Spring 2014 - The Salisbury Review

Transcription

The
The quarterly magazine
Loving the Daily
Mail
Jan Ball
of conservative thought
The New Spice Road
Sam Aldred
Scotland’s Blessing?
Pointing the Racist Christie Davies
Bone
Jane Kelly
Spring 2014
Vol 32 No 3
Confessions of
Eeyore
Theodore
Dalrymple
Egypt’s Copts
Bishop Angaelos
£6.00
Contents
3 Editorial
Articles
4 Culloden, Scotland’s Blessing
Christie Davies
6 Mush
Penelope Fawcett Hulme
8 Letter from America
Matthew Walther
9 Bad Manners in Barking
Don Beech
11 Demography and Destiny?
Russell Lewis
13 Time to Embrace our Inner Daily Mail
Jan Ball
15 Operation Sovereign Borders
Daryl McCann
Columns
28 Conservative Classic — 54
Isabel Paterson The God of the Machine
30 Reputations — 42
F W de Clerk
32 Eternal Life
Peter Mullen
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17 The Recantation of Eeyore
Theodore Dalrymple
19 Pointing the Racist Bone
Jane Kelly
21 Gove’s Choice
Alistair Miller
23 The New Spice Road?
S V Aldred
24 An Ancient Church
His Grace Bishop Angaelos
26 Gray’s Anatomy
Patricia Morgan
Arts & Books
34 Nigel Jones
on War Graves
35 Jane Kelly
on East Germany
36 John Jolliffe
on George Herbert
37 Celia Haddon
on Birds
39 Anthony Daniels
on Melancholia
40 Christie Davies
on an eminent Sociologist
42 Michael St John Parker
on the Enlightenment
43 Richard Packer
on Drugs
44 Merrie Cave
on the Spanish Civil War
46 Peter Mullen
on God
46 Ron Capshaw
on JFK
48 Film: This Happy Breed
Scott Grønmark
50 Music: Battle Music
Ralph Berry
52 Art: Viennese Portraiture
Andrew Wilton
54 In Short
Editor: Myles Harris
Literary Editor: Merrie Cave
Consulting Editors: Roger Scruton
Lord Charles Cecil, Jane Kelly,
Christie Davies, Ian Crowther
33 Canonbury Park South, London N1 2JW
Tel: 020 7226 7791
E-mail: [email protected]
Web site: http://www.salisburyreview.com
O
n 13th August 1940 Herman Goering launched
Adler Tag, Eagle Day, the Luftwaffe’s all out
assault on Britain. Thanks to years of denial
by British governments that Hitler intended war, an illequipped RAF suffered terrible casualties. By the 31st
of August it looked as if we might lose. As a last resort
and down to a handful of Hurricanes, Air Vice Marshal
Dowding ordered the mobilisation of the 303 Polish
squadron at Northolt. It was an act of pure desperation.
The RAF establishment considered Poles to be reckless
dreamers. Hadn’t they lost their country by sending string
and wire biplanes against Hitler’s Messerschmitts?
Extraordinarily brave, on their first sortie 303 Squadron
shot down a record number of German planes. At the end
of the Battle of Britain Polish pilots accounted for 15 per
cent of the German ‘kill’. If Polish aircrews did not win
this great air battle, it would not, it is said, have been won
without them. People clapped them in the street.
They fought fiercely because they knew the price of
appeasement and weak government, and what it is like to
lose your country. When the Nazis and Soviets invaded
Poland thousands of young men made their way first to
France and then Britain in order to carry on the fight. By
the end of the war, Poland’s army was the fourth largest of
the Allies. A Polish flag flew over that symbol of crushed
Nazi ambition, the ramparts of Monte Cassino.
It did the Poles little good. At Stalin’s request they were
specifically excluded from the Victory Parade in Whitehall.
Every other nation, even Tonga, marched, but no Poles.
Seeing a young man in a Polish pilot’s uniform next to her
in the crowd in tears, an elderly woman asked him ‘Why
are you crying?’
Many left for America, Canada and Australia while postwar Britain embarked on a programme of encouraging
non-European settlement. While it was very difficult for
an Australian or American to obtain permanent residency,
those with the least cultural links with us were encouraged,
the door being opened ever wider to Africans and Asians
to come in their tens of thousands as dependents of the
state. The latter were told their hosts bore a secret animus
toward them, felt guilty and were anxious to pay them large
amounts of social security in reparation. The newcomers
were encouraged in a form of social apartheid called
The Salisbury Review — Spring 2014
multiculturalism.
When, five years ago, the Poles returned under EU
rules, we were confronted by something we had forgotten,
immigrants very similar to us, so like us that until they
spoke you would not know they were not British. Broadly
classed as Eastern Europeans but mostly Polish, they were
young and able-bodied, often well educated, extremely
hard working, polite, from a religious culture close to
ours and prepared to do the most menial jobs, even pulling
vegetables from the frozen fields of East Anglia.
Nor were they here to free-load on our social security
system. While the British took 11 per cent more in social
security than they paid in tax, Poles made a net contribution
to the exchequer of 34 per cent while our most favoured
immigrants, non-Europeans, managed a contribution of
2 per cent.
Our reaction was to treat the Poles exactly the same way
as before. ‘Polish women four times more likely to offer
risky sex!’ screamed The Daily Mail, while the anti-white
racist BBC sent reporters to Norfolk to ask local British
benefit recipients, once they bothered to get out of bed,
if they felt discriminated against by the hard-working
newcomers. Meanwhile the arrival of a far smaller number
of Romanians and Bulgarians allowed press and politicians
to conflate all Eastern Europeans into a single army of
menacing Slavs. The aim of both Tory and Labour Policy
is now to severely restrict Eastern European migration,
and therefore that of the Polish majority, while leaving
migration from the third world unchecked.
Just as in 1945 Stalin’s moles in Whitehall ensured
Poland’s contribution to victory was written out of
history, so our present rulers have not lost their addiction
to repressive socialism of which multiculturalism is a
powerful weapon. Cheap, uneducated labour means a
captive workforce, low factory gate prices, high profits
and a stagnant economy. Educated, mobile workers mean
a growing economy and rising wages. What is terrifying
is that the ordinary population do not see this and are
being led by the nose into an act of appalling bad manners
towards those who were our allies in the worst of times,
and would be our allies again. We are now truly part of
the third world.
back to contents
3
Culloden, Scotland’s Blessing?
Christie Davies
T
he Hanoverians were the most successful of all
Britain’s dynasties: German monarchs chosen
by the British people. When George I became
King exactly three hundred years ago, it was not by
divine right but by the Act of Settlement of 1701, passed
by both the English and the Scottish Parliaments. This
Act had led inexorably to the Parliamentary Union of
1707 that fully united Scotland with England and Wales
to ensure that there would be no remnant of support for
the displaced Stuarts. The attempt by James II’s son,
the Old Pretender, to supplant George I by invading
North Britain, the home of his Scottish ancestors, in
1715, ended in farce. The Union is a corollary of the
Hanoverian succession
and the Hanoverian era
was the time of England’s
long and productive love
affair with those two
models of Protestant
probity and intellectual
eminence, the Germans
and the Scots.
In 1714 Britain was
a small, unimportant,
offshore island on the edge
of Europe. It had only
recently emerged from
decades of internal strife
and political instability.
But by 1837 when Queen
Victoria came to the throne Britain was the world’s
first superpower. Britain dominated the trade of the
entire globe and her powerful navy, as big as that of
any two of her rivals put together, policed the oceans.
When Queen Victoria died the British Empire was the
largest ever seen, with a bigger population than China
and a bigger land mass than Russia, an empire with a
reach and impact that made those of Macedon, Rome
or Spain seem trivial. Under the Hanoverians Britain
became the world’s very first modern commercial and
industrial nation by the end of the eighteenth century
and went on to be the workshop of the world in the
first half of the nineteenth century and the world’s great
banker and investor in the second. The Hanoverians
were our golden age. Everything before them was
provincial and everything since them has been decline.
The Hanoverian monarchs were successful not
because of what they did but because of what they did
Web: www.salisburyreview.com
4
not do. They refrained from meddling in the lives of
ordinary people and allowed them freedom to trade
and manufacture, to speak their minds, to travel and
to create their own institutions. The great merit of the
first Hanoverian, George I, was that he was a German
who could speak no English and was more interested
in his native Hanover than in Britain. He did nothing
and the British people did everything. George I knew
full well that the terms of his being chosen as King
in preference to the descendants of James II were to
guarantee that Britain would have a Protestant monarch
who accepted the constitutional limits on his power and
he very sensibly kept out of things. George II was also
born in Germany; he spoke
English, but as his third or
possibly fourth language.
He spent his summers
in Hanover where he
proved to be a capable
soldier, took little interest
in British domestic politics
and followed the advice of
his sensible and intelligent
German wife Caroline of
Brandenburg-Anspach.
She was Regent when he
was away and worked
closely with the leaders
of the British parliament.
German hands-off meant
good and minimal government for Britain.
The reigns of the first four Georges were good for
England but even better for Scotland. Had there been
no Hanoverian stability and prosperity there would
have been no Scottish Enlightenment, no great age of
Adam Smith, David Hume, Colin Maclaurin, Robert
Adam, Joseph Black, James Hutton and Allan Ramsay.
It was an age of remarkable Scottish achievement
rooted in the Scots’ distinctive systems of education
and religion (now long defunct) but it required English
governance and German kings to allow it to emerge
and flourish.
George II’s German-speaking younger son and
godson of the King of Prussia was William Augustus,
Duke of Cumberland. By his victory at Culloden
in 1746 and the forceful Prussian pacification of
the Highlands that followed he made God-fearing,
civilized, thriving, commercial Lowland Scotland safe
for ever from the raiders, plunderers and extortionists
of the wild North. The last remnants of tribal and feudal
Britain had been extirpated and Britain in its entirety
became a modern market-based society. Culloden and
Adam Smith made Mrs Thatcher not just possible but
inevitable.
George III was not really German enough and his
strong British patriotism and sincere Anglicanism
caused problems. Yet as a man he embodied the
virtues of his age through his passionate interest in
agriculture and science. Farmer George was a keen
sheep breeder, who had Spanish merinos illegally
smuggled out of their native country to cross with
British sheep and improve their genetic stock, and
he wrote about improving the land for agricultural
periodicals. He founded the Royal Academy of Arts
and his vast collection of books today forms the heart
of the British Library. He was well educated in the
arts and the sciences, could mend a watch and turn
a lathe, and had his own astronomical observatory.
George III’s virtues are summed up in a single portrait,
Johann Zoffany’s John Cuff and his Assistant, 1772,
showing the king’s telescope and microscope maker
grinding a lens in his workshop. How many kings of
that era would have honoured a scientific craftsman
in this way? We should cherish the memory of the
quiet and frugal domestic life of George III, a king
with no mistresses, no bastards and no debts. It was in
George III’s reign that James Watt’s improved steam
engine with its condenser made possible the industrial
revolution. Watt was a pure Scottish genius but it took
the Englishman Matthew Boulton’s entrepreneurship
and capital to bring his invention to market. It was
another Anglo-Scottish triumph and today Boulton and
Watt appear on the Bank of England’s £50 note while
their godfather Adam Smith is there on the twenty, a
tribute to the Hanoverian Scots.
The culmination of Britain’s greatness occurred
under Queen Victoria. It was our final era of Caledonian
and Teutonic glory. Queen Victoria herself was a
strong upholder of the cult of the Germans and the
Scots. Most of Victoria’s ancestors were German,
since the little kingdoms of Germany provided the
only sizeable reservoir of Protestant princesses and
princelings who alone were suitable spouses for British
royalty. Victoria’s mother was a German princess and
her governess the daughter of a Lutheran pastor. It
was not entirely surprising when at the age of twenty
Victoria fell in love with, proposed to and married her
most worthy cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg
Gotha, Albert the Good, with whom she always spoke
German at home. Albert was the very embodiment of
German industriousness and earnestness, well shown
in his planning of the Great Exhibition of 1851 that
celebrated Britain’s industrial supremacy. King in all
but name, Albert was a keen supporter of science and
technical education and had he lived longer would
have helped to head off many of the problems that
now haunt us.
Victoria and Albert were obsessed with the Scottish
Highlands and made a home at Balmoral with tartan
linoleum and a full-sized statue of Albert in a kilt.
Albert the German loved shooting and he loved
Scotland. The descendants of the hapless crofters,
evicted from their holdings by their old clan chieftains,
who after 1746 had turned into profit-seeking landlords,
now found new employment as stalkers and ghillies,
gamekeepers and beaters. These new tame Highlanders
had been converted by Lowland missionaries to a strict
Calvinism and proved enthusiasts for the creation
of the Free Church in 1843. Their fundamentalist
adherence to the Bible was to lead to the heresy
trial of William Robertson Smith and his retreat to
Cambridge. They were rigidly sabbatarian and foes
to all ungodly fun. They were the most Scottish of the
Scots and the Scots were in turn the most Victorian of
the Victorians, the most British of the British in their
fierce adherence to Protestant morality. Scotland, the
very embodiment of Max Weber’s Protestant ethic,
produced engineers, missionaries and doctors and
provided the world with ships, locomotives and cotton
thread. The British Empire was thoroughly Scottish
from Nova Scotia to Otago. Scots ran commerce from
the jute trade in Bengal to the fur trade in Canada.
The Scots saw themselves as confidently superior and
loudly proclaimed the fact whenever given the chance.
‘Here’s tae us; Wha’s like us.’
It is no accident that one of the greatest Scotsmen of
all time, James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), a bornagain Christian, flourished in this golden afternoon of
the Hanoverian era. Maxwell explained the rings of
Saturn, made thermodynamics precise and invented
colour photography. The whole of modern science and
technology is based on Maxwell’s equations, which
unified our understanding of electricity, magnetism and
light in a single system. The equations predicted the
existence of radio waves and X-rays and the constancy
of the speed of light in a vacuum, the basis, as Einstein
himself recognized, of the theory of relativity. The
Nobel prize-winner Richard Feynman has written that
ten thousand years from now ‘there can be little doubt
that the most significant event of the 19th century
will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws
of electrodynamics’. Yet it took England to nurture
Maxwell, who when a student at Edinburgh University
was seen as a teuchter, a dumb rustic, and was later
sacked from his professorship by the unappreciative
University of Aberdeen, which forced him to move first
5
to King’s College London and then to Cambridge. A
leading poet writing in Scots in our own time, Professor
Keith Moffatt, has lamented that:
They ca’d him ‘dafty’ at the scule,
An’ that, we’ld think was awfie cruel...
Redundant in the granite city
An’ spurned by En’bro’, mair’s the pity,
He ended up awa’ doon South.
Without England Scotland is nothing. With England
it has been everything. The union of the two countries
during the Hanoverian years was the most fruitful
in human history. Today the political leaders of an
enfeebled Scotland with its collapsing national church,
predicted to die in 2033, and a bankrupt economy
are seeking to turn its back on the glorious days of
Hanover and go back to where it was in 1700. Scottish
nationalism is both an admission of Scotland’s failure
and an attempt to deny it.
Within thirteen years of the death of Queen Victoria,
the grandmother of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Britain was at
war with Germany, a fratricidal war that ruined both
countries. Behind it lay the malice of the wayward
and decadent Edward VII, who earlier in life had
wilfully dropped out of the moral and intellectual
educational programme designed for him by his wise
German father Albert the Good. Edward was jealous of
Germany’s economic and scientific success and loathed
his nephew. He was a lover of the decadent culture of
Paris where in his favourite brothel, Le Chabanais,
he liked having sex with two women at once, though
on account of his excessive portliness only with the
help of a special chair and ropes and pulleys. It was
Edward VII, a great meddler in foreign affairs, who
was mainly responsible for the alliance with France,
the Entente Cordiale of 1904, the details of which were
not debated in parliament or revealed to the public.
How much better for the world it would have been
if Edward had been gay and sought the company of
the Kaiser’s confidential associates, his camarilla of
cinnaedi, who were very much that way inclined. As
it was, Edward’s intrigues led Britain into the First
World War, the first conflict since the Hundred Years
War to lead to debt and decline.
Today Britain is back where it was in 1714, a tiny
offshore island whose share of the world’s total trade
and production is about what it was three hundred
years ago. The official state newspaper of China, the
Beijing Global Times, forcibly pointed this out to our
chief commercial drummer, Mr Cameron, on his visit to
the world’s new leading country when it called Britain
‘just an old European country, fit only for tourists and
students’. The Hanoverian glory has gone and political
correctness decrees that past greatness should not be
mentioned, which is why we should now make a point
of celebrating their memory – our memory.
Christie Davies is the author of The Strange Death of
Moral Britain
back to contents
Mush
Penelope Fawcett Hulme
I
first came across Max when I saw a youth
pinning up a photo of his long mournful face and
questioning blue eyes, on my local bus stop in west
London. The lad hardly spoke English but explained
that he had been looking after the dog for friends in
far-off Croydon, but it had escaped.
‘You can’t have them indoors’, he said, sounding
very impressed. ‘You can’t train them’, he said
excitedly, ‘these dogs do whatever they like’.
He obviously loved that idea. Apparently a lot of
people who might be described as the poorer members
of society now favour the Husky as the dog of choice.
It’s large, can’t be easily trained and looks like a wolf,
what more could an urban city dweller in a tiny flat
want in a pet? Later I rang the number on the poster.
Although it was lunch-time the voice on the phone
sounded very sleepy, almost comatose, and very young.
6
I explained that I was ringing up to find out about Max.
‘I don’t know why we got him’, she said. ‘My
boyfriend wanted him, I think because it’s brown and
looks like a wolf.’
She told me she was seventeen, unemployed and
living with her boyfriend who works in ‘events
management’.
‘It’s a bit of a hassle really’, she said. ‘You can’t leave
them on their own. Max has got a stress anxiety. If we
leave him alone he tears the place to pieces. He costs
at least £20 a week to feed.’
I said that from what I know, Huskys are pack dogs
and really like to be with other Huskys. She didn’t
reply. I asked her if she regretted getting him. ‘No’,
she said, ‘but you have to be dedicated’.
Perhaps she and her boyfriend are committed to
Max, but other British people are not so bothered
viewers of BBC Nature programmes would have been
struck, if they ever thought of such a thing, by how
unsuited those gorgeous-looking dogs would be for
any British home, especially in cities. They have not
been intensively bred away from their wild origins
like most domestic dogs, are very hard to train and
ideally need to run miles, going at the speed of a motor
scooter, every day.
Twenty years ago people would have laughed at the
idea of taking one in, seeing it as no more sensible than
adopting a Bengal tiger or grizzly bear. But according
to Battersea, they have had a 93 per cent increase in
the number of these animals coming into the centre in
the last six years. The Alaskan Malamute, not even a
recognised breed, is now the fastest growing strain in the
UK, outnumbering Poodles, Basset Hounds and Corgis.
The reason is the influence of popular culture with its
demand for instant gratification, even the demands of
fantasy. The trend started with The Golden Compass, a
2007 fantasy adventure film, based on Philip Pullman’s
trilogy His Dark Materials. It showed decorative wolves
alongside the decorative Nicole Kidman in a sleigh. Then
came Twilight, a Vampire series from novels by Stephanie
Meyer. Vampires are a huge cult with the young, and these
books also became films featuring a pack of beautiful
Werewolves, which many people would also take home
if they could. The final rise of the Husky came with he
popular American TV series Game of Thrones. This
featured a ‘Direwolf’, a mythical extinct wolf, including
scenes with adorable fluffy cubs.
‘Real education is needed to stop people going along
with the whims of fashion’, says Rebecca.
Dogs have always been subject to fashion of course.
Two years ago, the success hit of the silent film The
Artist led to a Jack Russell mania. But they are not so
hard to keep and are English to the biscuit bone; a lot
of people have experience of keeping them. There was
also the film Legally Blonde in 2001, which led to a
lot of chic young women carrying Chihuahuas in their
Louis Vuitton handbags.
For many people animals represent a throw-away
novelty. But small dogs, representing luxury and
sometimes standing in for human infants, obtained
from reputable breeders, are not so readily abandoned;
but who can say what large fighting dogs represent in
the minds of their, usually male, owners? In this dogloving nation many people want dogs for status, and
that status is low. Owning them is about being a pack
leader, it’s a form of aggressive display.
The Dangerous Dogs Act of 1991 bans wolf hybrids
but this has not been applied to Arctic dogs. The Act
has made little difference to the welfare of dogs as men
who buy them to use them as weapons are abetted by
the on-line culture, particularly sites like Gum Tree,
about their Arctic pets. At Christmas, Battersea Dog’s
Home magazine reported that they had rescued 26
Akitas, a Japanese hunting dog with a double coat like
a Husky, 16 Malamutes, Arctic pack dogs, 65 Siberian
Huskys and one Northern Inuit, a new breed designed
to look like a wolf. Since the New Year, they’ve taken
in another Akita and four more Huskys. All these
interlopers need good homes, somewhere.
Senior re-homer Rebecca Norris, 28, who’s been
at Battersea for six years, showed me around their
premises near Windsor. First I met Foxy, a one-year-old
Japanese Akita, bred for hunting with the Shogun, and
guarding property. She’s been there since February 3rd,
2013 and shows no sign of finding an owner, after being
dumped on a London street. As she is their longest
serving resident, Rebecca gave her a good, hard sell.
‘She’s clever and obedient’, she said, ‘she likes
watching TV’. Documentaries are probably as near as
she’ll ever get to the call of the wild.
She is also sometimes known as ‘Foxy the wonder
dog’. On her daily walk she alerted her handler to
a weak and severely emaciated Great Dane puppy
abandoned in a ditch, just hours from death. That dog,
renamed Faith, was re-homed thirty days later. Perhaps
Foxy’s lupine grin counts against her with the five
hundred or so people who visit Battersea every week,
looking for suitable pets to take home.
We moved down the long corridor, with its barred doors,
which rather resembles a wing in Wormwood Scrubs.
Pleading black eyes and wet noses peeped out at us,
until we reached the puzzled blue gaze of Persephone, a
four-year-old, grey Siberian Husky. She’d been there for
a month, after being abandoned at a boarding-kennels. ‘A
bit depressed now’, said Rebecca.
The notice on her cage described her as ‘Large’.
‘People have no idea how much it costs to keep these
dogs in fresh meat, or how much attention they need’,
said Rebecca.
I think they might guess. It was obvious to me when
I saw Dexter’s elongated face peering, if not leering
at me round his bars, looking exactly like his brother
wolf. A boisterous red and white dog, he arrived from
Wales on November 11th. Battersea recently received
a Husky bitch and six pups and have re-homed them
all, hoping that none will be returned.
Described on Wikipedia as ‘An ever changing crossbreed between domestic dogs and wolf, one of the
fastest dogs’, Husky comes from the same word once
used for Arctic people in general. Eskimos were once
known as Huskys, a contraction of Huskimos, used by
English sailors on trading vessels.
Once these dogs were quite happy living in the
Arctic, pulling fast sledges and hunting large game
for their Inuit masters. Readers of Jack London and
7
where breeders can sell fighting dogs and unsuitable
breeds for thousands of pounds. At Battersea they say it
is increasingly easy to get a dog of any kind, no matter
how wild or dangerous. They want legislation to close
down internet sale of animals. They are promoting
a group called the Pet Advertising Advisory Group,
(PAAG) to warn people about the on-line wolves in
sheep’s clothing posing as dog breeders.
Up against a culture of instant self-gratification,
the growing participation of the young in fantasies
provided in cyber-space, one can only wish them well.
Penelope Fawcett Hulme is a social observer.
back to contents
Letter from America
Matthew Walther
I
have just finished the last volume of George
Santayana’s letters, which means that I must find
something else to do with my spare time. I thought
the other day that I might take up ‘vaping’, which is to
say, inhaling a heated-up mixture of nicotine and other
chemicals from a battery-charged plastic tube designed
to resemble a rather large cigarette. As neologisms
go, ‘vaping’ for the use of e-cigarettes is not half bad.
‘Smoke’ is after all what one exhales when ‘smoking’
the real thing, just as vapour is the product of a drag
from one of these gadgets, so at least the words are
parallel. It only remains to discover what the languagemad Quebecois will call this extraordinary new device:
‘cigarette-t-el’, after the manner of ‘courriel’, does not
quite work, at least to my mind.
For someone who came of age with cigarettes
in an era of workplace bans and dirty looks from
colleagues, there is something exhilarating about the
idea of enjoying a nice legal smoke-substitute in so
many public places. I can vape virtually anywhere:
in trains and buses and friends’ cars, in elevators
and supermarkets, at my office and my officially
smoke-free apartment, on the metro or the roof of a
family-owned restaurant. Time, too, is now on my
side. A few puffs over my morning coffee, during my
too-expensive salad lunch, before and after my quiet
dinner at home, while trying to fall asleep without, for
once, the sane, civilized voice of the author of The Last
Puritan singing in my ears – why not?
Nothing gold can stay, of course, and I wonder if
I do take up the habit how long I shall be able to get
away with it. When the freshly-inaugurated mayor of
New York City has made the banning of horse-drawn
carriages a top priority, what hope could there be for
vaping? Anything that gives ordinary people a minute
or two of pleasure is automatically suspect. Already
legislators in the California assembly are calling for use
of e-cigarettes to be restricted according to the terms
8
of the state’s austere anti-smoking laws. They claim
to be very worried about the possible adverse effects
of scentless, tasteless ‘second-hand vapour’.
California is one of 20 states that currently allows
residents to use cannabis for so-called ‘medicinal’
purposes. This drug, which is now completely legal
in Oregon and Washington state, used to be only for
the long-hairs and flunkies whom Nixon persecuted so
gleefully. Now in many parts of this country it is much
easier to obtain than tobacco, and in urbane liberal
circles its consumption is far less frowned upon than
that of the plant without whose cultivation and export
my new home state of Virginia would not have been
founded. (I live only five miles north of the site of
George Washington’s plantation.)
About cannabis I am afraid that my opinions are
unfashionable in the extreme. For one thing I do not like
the idea that something illegal under federal law is not
only tolerated but promoted, regulated, and, in the form
of heavy duties already being collected in Colorado,
made a source of profit by state governments. From a
legal perspective this is a disastrous state of affairs. It
makes a joke of the federal government. One can only
hope that before too long the Supreme Court will either
strike down the states’ legalization measures or declare
the nationwide ban on cannabis unconstitutional: either
outcome would be preferable to the present situation
in which millions of Americans are made to think that
the rule of law is a laughable fiction.
When it comes to cannabis I do not share the kneejerk pro-legalization attitude that has somehow become
ubiquitous in the last decade or so, even among selfdescribed American ‘conservatives’. I do not think that
it is grossly unjust if dope peddlers are put in prison.
Nor do I think that there exists any abstract, unalienable
‘right’ to use this or any other drug simply on the
grounds that its use does not harm anyone else. (I am
not a scientist or a physician, so I cannot speak credibly
about the dangers of cannabis; but to my knowledge
recent studies have suggested that it may not be as
safe for individuals, especially those suffering from
severe mental illness, as has often been assumed.) A
dying man short of cash might easily sell posthumous
rights to his body to a gang of necrophiliacs or an
anthropophagite dining society without harming others,
and no doubt there are some libertarian purists who
would defend to the death the supposed right of both
parties to engage in such a debased form of voluntary
economic exchange. The often-made comparison with
our disastrous prohibition of alcohol is nothing short
of idiotic: a majority of the adult population of the
United States regularly drank when the Volstead Act
was passed, while cannabis was almost unknown when
it was formally banned in 1937.
The problem is not, as data-crunching opinion
columnists often claim, that we are currently jailing
far too many people for possession of the drug; it is
that the law against possession is so rarely enforced
that whenever it is it appears to be an act of gross
injustice. The point of imprisoning convicted cannabis
users is not to punish but rather to deter. At present
we are putting just enough people in choky to justify
keeping laws against cannabis on the books but not
nearly enough to discourage anyone with half a brain
from using it. We are spending billions of dollars
prosecuting people – usually dealers rather than users
– for admittedly non-violent offences.
This, I think, is the crux of the matter. For anyone but
the most callow post-adolescent anarchist, the cannabis
issue has nothing to do with rights and everything to
do with costs. But the billions we spend imprisoning
people for drug use is nothing in comparison with the
trillions we are spending on entitlement programs, an
over-active military, and public pension schemes – to
say nothing of the trillions more we will spend if we
do not repeal President Obama’s healthcare law and
defeat so-called ‘comprehensive immigration reform’.
The above sounds suspiciously like an agenda, and a
serious one at that. I did not mean to make this quarter’s
column the occasion for a harangue about fiscal
policy, of all things. Really, beyond the basic threat
posed to the rule of law by the gulf between federal
and state policy, I do not much care about cannabis or
the laws governing its use. I would like it to remain
illegal and, eventually, become unfashionable again.
But, like cannabis users, I am fundamentally selfish.
Given a choice between a country in which all forms
of smoking are illegal and one in which I can light
up my Marlboro Blend No 27s and my foul-smelling
neighbour can get blitzed out of his mind on cannabis,
I should certainly choose the latter.
Alas, things are never so simple. Oh well. I need to
look again at prices for the New York Met’s upcoming
performance of Prince Igor. Perhaps I shall hire a
carriage when I am in town. The driver might even
allow me to vape.
Matthew Walther is Assistant Editor at the American Spectator.
back to contents
Bad Manners in Barking
Don Beech
T
describe it as an aesthetically grim and potentially
depressing place. Other than being the site of the Ford
Motor Company, what at one time – and not so long
ago – set it apart from other London boroughs was its
ethnically stable and homogeneous white population
– originally an overflow from the old East End.
But notwithstanding this less than flattering
description, one thing you could never say was that
its residents lacked identity or didn’t share a sense
of community or continuity. In my experience there
was always a feeling of prosperity in belonging to
a place which, although undoubtedly rough by any
standards, was at the same time like no other in
London. In other words, it felt like it was ours. And
whilst acknowledging its many shortcomings, for me
it captured the essence of what Roger Scruton calls
he London Borough of Barking and Dagenham
lies approximately nine miles east of the City
of London. Its housing is composed of the
largest number of local authority dwellings in London,
plus housing association, privately rented and cheap
privately owned stock. Historically it has been and
remains an economically deprived region with little
social mobility. Its general culture was always straight
forwardly East-End industrial working class: drinking
(often very heavily in working men’s clubs and
traditional spit ‘n’ sawdust pubs), football, a liking for a
fight (including on the part of many of its womenfolk)
DIY, angling and until relatively recently, working.
Extended families were and still are very common.
And as someone who grew up and was in part educated
there (yes, we even had our own University) I would
9
oikophilia or love of home.
But during the last fifteen years or so, a multisocial
and multicultural revolution has taken place. You only
have to walk the borough’s streets to see this. So,
seemingly having escaped the worst excesses which
occurred elsewhere in London, the borough’s libraries
and council offices have now been transformed into
advice and translation centres largely for the care of
three social groups: immigrants who have recently
arrived in droves; the indigenous state-dependent
and truly poverty-stricken white community; and
the bewildered elderly who have no option or
energy but to remain. To put this transformation into
some perspective here are some simple but telling
demographics. And bear in mind these figures apply to
legal immigration only. By their own recent admission
no government department, local or national, has any
idea how many ‘illegals’ there are in the borough.
Contrasting national censuses for the years 2001
and 2011, the total overall population has grown from
164,000 to 186,000, a growth of 13.5 per cent. This
figure includes a 50 per cent growth in 0 to 4 yearolds (the highest in England and Wales) and a 20 per
cent decrease in 65 year-olds (the highest in London).
This breaks down ethnically as follows: in 2001 the
figure for ‘White British’ was 133,000 (80 per cent
of the total population) whereas by 2011 it had fallen
to 92,000 (50 per cent). During the same period the
figures for ‘Africans’ were 7,000 (4.5 per cent) and
29,000 (15.5 per cent) meaning the African population
increased by 293 per cent as the White British fell
by 30 per cent. When you bear in mind that by 2011
the national figure for Africans was 1.84 per cent
(contrasted locally to 15.5 per cent) the speed at which
this remarkable concentration of so many Africans in
one smallish London borough must give pause for
thought, especially when considering the possible
consequences for social and cultural cohesion. But
Africans aren’t the only incomers; because of cheap
private housing Eastern Europeans and South Asians
have also arrived in great numbers. Under the heading
‘Born Outside of the UK’, whereas the figure for 2001
was 19,000, by 2011 it had grown to 58,000, a 205 per
cent increase. By any rational standards these are eyewatering numbers. In conservative eyes the problems
this raises are many, varied and potentially highly
dangerous; especially for feelings of belonging which
problems of social cohesion can mobilise.
Guaranteed to be unnervingly exacerbated by
the recent lifting of EU immigration restrictions on
Romanians and Bulgarians, the acute and growing
shortages of housing, transport, education, health,
and social services are well known, extensively
documented, and in no need of rehearsing here. But
10
what about the existential dimension? What is it now
like to live in Barking and Dagenham for a member of
the now fast dwindling white population? What does
it feel like for an old cockney like me?
Until relatively recently Barking town centre was a
model of 20th century civic pride; although during the
1960s things started to go awry when it got a ‘state of
the art’ railway station and a modernist library building
to add to the tasteful Edwardian architecture of its
existing municipal buildings. These included a typical
‘Dixon of Dock Green’ style police station (with blue
lamp) and a Town Hall and Magistrates Court arranged
thoughtfully and in pleasing proportions around a large
traditional town square, generally used by workers
in their lunch break, resting shoppers, and for the
occasional local ceremonial (for instance, Armistice
Day). There was also a highly rated theatre which was
well used by the local population, a cinema, and a good
range of quality shops and lively, if old fashioned, pubs.
Even Barking Town Football Club ground was
centrally located just a stone’s throw from the town
square; so there were plentiful activities and facilities
to encourage a strong sense of local pride, belonging,
identity and feeling of being at home.
But during the last fifteen years or so, a calamity has
been visited on Barking’s buildings and public spaces,
which, in Milan Kundera’s phrase, have been well and
truly ‘uglified’ in line with the so-called ‘values’ of the
most extreme pole of socialist-redemptive modernism.
In this permanently socialist local authority, the main
road which once cut east to west through the town
centre was replaced by a meandering one-way public
transport system which turned public enterprises and
private dwellings into ‘pools’ of isolated activity on the
edge of town, and in so doing re-created the town centre
as a pedestrians-only precinct. The already brutalist
concrete library has physically become the base for
two additional stories of glass and steel flats as part of
an ‘award winning’ and ‘aspirational’ redevelopment
of the centre; which has also seen the symmetry of
the town square destroyed by the expropriation of
some of its ‘excess’ space for even more modernist
Mediterranean-style flats and (unoccupied) offices
for rent. The local football ground no longer exists,
having given way to a shopping mall development.
And to put the cherry on the cake many local pubs
with long histories have called time, in some cases
because the areas they served have been dried out
by Islamification. Decisively for the pre-existing
population, the ‘progressive’ architects and socialist
bureaucrats responsible for this cultural vandalism
have shown no care for or understanding of indigenous
customs, culture, and yes, feelings.
And one last thing; when it comes to the now fully
pedestrianised town centre street market, what stands
out is its now almost total Africanisation. Encounters
with the sight and smell of salted fish are now an
everyday experience, and the rump of the white
population who brave the market and fancy a cup
of tea and a (London) cheese cake, are now ‘kettled’
in a single ‘caff’ exclusively for their own use and
culturally cut off from the rest of the market: a case
of what Muslims call the dhimmi or an indulged
concession to an alien culture. But of course, if you
want goat curry, halal meat, or yam to go with your
salted fish there are plenty of street merchants to choose
from and barter with. And if you need a shiny new
Bible or a DVD giving you advice on how to drive
out demons or interpret tongues, well you’ve most
definitely landed on the right planet.
Doubtless, enforced multisocialism and multiculturalism is the borough’s future whether an old
cockney like me wants it or not. And of course, given
the fertility of the ethnic minority the kind of internal
exile typified in the situation experienced by the ‘caff’s’
customers can only get worse. But as is usual, those
who don’t count and are no longer wanted – members
and descendants of the old industrial working class
– get no say. And nowhere is this better illustrated in
my home town. But something I learned when l was
very young was that manners count. When enjoying
the hospitality of neighbours the first consideration is
to the feelings and norms of those neighbours. In this,
my experience of being a member of the traditional
working class is in complete accord with the normative
fundamentals of conservatism. What has happened
to people like me is nothing short of a tidal wave of
bad manners, and those responsible for it ought to be
ashamed of themselves and one day brought to account.
After all, who would blame the rest of the world
for knocking on the door of our prosperity? Certainly
not me!
Don Beech is a new contributor.
back to contents
Demography and Destiny?
Russell Lewis
O
as the United States. If those calculations are anywhere
near the mark, they powerfully support the dictum:
‘Demography is destiny’. For, if things had worked out
that way, the history not only of France and Europe but
that of the whole world in the twentieth century would
have been transformed.
Yet why blame the Revolution because France
does not now rule the roost? Could it just be chance
that Gallic decline coincided with the end of their
revolutionary era? – I am assuming that the Revolution
and the reign of Napoleon were all of a piece. Well,
of course, part of the trouble was the wars, civil and
foreign, of the period, which led to the deaths of 2.4
million French men and women – a big loss out of 30
million! Even that, however, could not have caused
the huge change which actually occurred. In fact
Napoleon took rather a light-hearted, if also appallingly
cynical, view of the population issue. After the battle of
Eylau with the Russians in which the French suffered
dreadful casualties, Napoleon remarked ‘One night in
Paris should repair the carnage’. Yet what he and his
contemporaries completely overlooked was how one
of the least controversial legal changes wrought by the
Revolution – the inescapable law of equal inheritance
ne of Margaret Thatcher’s shrewdest reactions
to events was in her refusal in 1989 to join the
celebration of the bicentenary of the French
Revolution. As she said at the time, in an interview with
Le Monde, it didn’t do us any good and it certainly didn’t
mark the birth of human rights. What she didn’t go on
to say was that it was not an occasion for rejoicing for
France either, but rather marked the start of declining
French power, in which the French Revolution played
a decisive role. Far and away the most important factor
was population change. At the beginning of the 19th
century France had 20 per cent of Europe’s population.
By 1848 that share had dropped to 10 per cent and that
trend continued until the 1890s when there were four
years in which the number of French deaths exceeded
the number of births. Meantime the populations of
Germany, the UK, Russia, etc. were growing fast.
These changes were momentous and fatal for France.
Yet, according to Wikipedia, if the French population
had grown between 1815 and 2000 at the same rate
as Germany’s, France would have 110 million people
today. Then again, if France’s population had grown
as fast as that in England and Wales from the time of
Louis XIV, then it would now contain as many people
11
– which seemed to be such a rightful assertion of the
ideal of equality – was breaking the peasant backbone
of France. An early critic of this measure was the
notable historian Alexis de Tocqueville, who said
it was a machine for chopping up the land. That’s
exactly what it turned out to be. Here are the figures
for landholdings from 1815 to 1860: large proprietaries
up from 20,000 to 40,000, small proprietors up from
3 to 4 million. Or take the number of landholdings,
which went from 12.4 million in 1850 to 13.8 million
twenty years later. Nor was this a period of improving
agricultural productivity. In the Midi in these years they
were still using the same plough that was common in
the Roman era. Even in the north of France in 1848,
they were still employing the triennial rotation: winter
wheat, summer wheat and fallow, which the English
economist Arthur Young, in the previous century, had
criticised as typical of the Ancien Régime.
This carving-up of the land into ever more diminutive
plots may have appealed to those who cared for nothing
more than revolutionary justice, but it spelt disaster for
agricultural productivity and was even more fatal for the
French rural birth rate. For what peasant farmer would
wish, when he died, for the family farm to be divided up
into little strips between all his offspring? Much better,
surely, to have fewer kids. This was a prime example of
a law having unintended consequences. The Revolution
was supposed to release the energies of the people from
the shackles of the kings, priest and nobles rather than
hamper their growth. To adapt the famous pronouncement
of Rousseau – the peasant was reborn free but everywhere
he was economically in the chains of inheritance equality
laws imposed by the Napoleonic code. These inhibited his
reproduction and gradually, generation after generation,
reduced his plot and drove him into economic stasis. Yet,
while the peasant from an economic point of view was
being preserved in aspic, there was an intellectual drive,
by the historian Michelet and many others, to adulate
him as the embodiment of French national virtues,
which played well with the French public. This myth
provided the popular basis for a policy of agricultural
protectionism which, at France’s behest, (and favoured
by Germany’s numerous part-time farmers) duly morphed
into the Common Agricultural Policy of the European
Union. The CAP is an economically reactionary policy
which swallows nearly half of the EU budget. It reveals
its scientific backwardness by banning GM foods –
mankind’s best hope for meeting an expanding future
global food demand. The CAP originally supplied its farm
support through maintaining food prices but that has since
turned, through income support, into an agri-welfare state
This has no connection with productivity whatsoever, as
it is based on acreage, or, if you prefer, hectares.
Nor was it just France’s sons of the soil who were
12
put off having babies. Right at the dawn of the Second
Empire (1848), The French Academy of Science
gave its official approval to a thoroughly Malthusian
warning of the dangers of overpopulation. In 1852 the
municipal council of Versailles instituted a prize for
temperance, that was for having a moderate number
of children. So the bourgeoisie joined the fashion, just
in time to exploit the new techniques of contraception
that were then becoming available (in this respect
the French were always ahead of the other nations of
Europe). In other respects it was far from timely: a
generation or so later, the French political elite was
panicking about a declining birth rate. Yet the damage
was done: swooning fertility rates are unforgiving and
not swiftly or easily reversed.
If demographics have wreaked the sharp decline of
France, the country which had dominated Europe for
over a century, what do they promise for the rest of
us? If we cast our minds forward to 2060, it looks as
if the demographics are hell-bent on putting recent
history into reverse. According to the EU’s 2012
Ageing Report, by 2060 Germany’s total population,
for long the mightiest in Europe, will drop from its
present 82 million to 66 million. The UK and France,
on the other hand, will be making a comeback: the UK
from 60 to 79 million and France from 62 to74 million.
However 14 of the 27 countries in the EU will have
smaller populations by 2060, with the most depressing
prospects held out for the Mediterranean countries, and
those in Central and Eastern Europe.
The most worrying thing is that across Europe as a
whole the population is ageing, which means that the
labour force is shrinking. For the EU in general those
of working age, who currently outnumber those over
65 by four to one, will, by 2060, be only two to one.
In the light of this trend it is hard to see how existing
pension and retirement arrangements can survive.
Even so, there seems no reason why people who live
healthily for longer should not go on working for
longer – indeed there is evidence that it helps them to
stay the course better. Also there are huge possibilities
of substituting capital for labour, whether in the form
of robots or simply more clever machines. The most
encouraging new development, which must become
widespread not so far ahead, is the driverless car – a
real boon for the ageing toiler.
We are constantly told by pessimists in the press
that Europe will fade out in competition with the
more energetic nations in the rest of the world,
notably the BRICs – Brazil, Russia, India and China.
Well, certainly, Brazil and India have large, growing
populations and should do well if they can curb the
corruption at home. Population growth is potent, but
it is not fate: it will not redeem you from a breakdown
of government. And what on earth is Russia doing in
a list of growth stars? Its population is on the slide!
142 million today to 133 million in 2060 and plunging.
In due course on present trends Moslems will be
half the population. Then there is China, favourite of
popular forecasters as the next leading world power.
Yet the population of China, 1370 million today will
have shrunk to 1262 million by 2060. This will be the
unsurprising result of the crazy one-child policy, still
being pursued (crazy because rising living standards
would have made the adjustment without any state
intervention) which is also creating a serious sex
imbalance, so that in recent decades there have been
80 girls for every 100 boys born in China. There
is, besides, a serious ageing problem – the working
population there peaked early – in 2012. Thus, it is
said, China will grow old before it gets rich.
What are we to make of all these population changes?
Frankly forecasts are very varied and therefore very
confusing. Moreover here’s another statistic – which
are the ten nations in the world with the fastest growing
populations? They are all in Africa, quite a few of them,
like Mali, in the most war-, or otherwise grief-stricken
areas. At the other end of the scale take Japan. Not that
long ago, many thought it was poised to take over from
America as lead nation. Yet a headline in the Daily
Mail a month or two ago announced ‘Falling birth
rates mean Japan won’t have any children under 15
by 3011’. Of course even for Japan there is still time
before it becomes extinct, but watch out! Demography
may not map the route forward with the finality of
Calvin’s predestination but it’s still the most potent
guide to whither we are bound.
Russell Lewis worked for the Daily Mail.
back to contents
Time to Embrace our Inner
Daily Mail
Jan Ball
I
used not to be a Daily Mail reader. It isn’t difficult
to find fault with the newspaper, with its celebrityobsessed glamour stories, its sanctimonious
headlines and easy populism. The front page will
be screaming about tax
payers’ value for money
one moment, bemoaning
cuts in pensions the next; or
launching a personal attack
on some unsuspecting pop
star because of this or that
life choice. Why oh why
is she wearing pink to her
wedding? How dare he say
that to her about them behind
my back! At its best, the
paper is highly entertaining
and readable. At its worst,
it can be horrid, targeting
individuals, well-known or
otherwise, with malicious
slander, ruining careers and
relationships on the back of
questionable journalism.
Others make further
criticisms. Medhi Hasan’s BBC attack in November
2013 typified the anti-Mail feeling of so many liberals,
calling it ‘immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, muslimsmearing, NHS-undermining and gay-baiting’,
his words ringing slightly
hollow when it emerged
he’d applied for a column
– ‘I have always admired
the paper’s passion, rigour,
boldness and of course, news
values’, he fawned.
Yet debates about the
worthiness of the paper
were not what kept me away
originally. Rather, like many
people, I’d lazily followed
my own parents’ choice and
plumped for The Telegraph –
we are such creatures of habit,
aren’t we – and played it safe.
Numerous forays into The
Independent left me several
times bitten and forever shy,
The Times and The Guardian
came and went, the former
13
when there came a pay wall on their website, and the
latter when it treated the 2011 rioters as noble protesters
with a perfectly valid point to make actually thank you
very much. It was time to make the homeward journey
back to the warm bosom of the family paper, and the
comforting breast milk of Charles Moore. The Mail, on
the other hand, simply passed me by.
It was impossible however, as anyone with a pair
of eyes and ears will attest, to avoid the constant
derogatory comments made about the Mail. In dinner
party conversations among the young, metropolitan
movers and shakers that I considered myself a part of,
the average Mail reader’s primitiveness was always a
safe conversational reference point, like the importance
of doctors and nurses, or the idiocy of having football
at the Olympics. Yet after hearing a dozen Guardian
readers execrate it, and after witnessing time after time
those slightly lame BBC comedians lampooning The
Mail ‘Immigrants cause house prices to plummet!’
– I thought that it must be pretty good after all and
got stuck in – my enemy’s enemy and all that. What
is more, the breathtaking, relentless attacks that
one witnesses week in week out against it on every
terrestrial news programme and panel show going,
appealed to a fondness for the underdog.
Perhaps the experience that I remember best was
about a year ago, at a party held with a girl who was
being mildly flirtatious, OK very flirtatious, and with
whom I’d already made several, what a psychic reader
might have called, ‘hits’. We both preferred the Lord
of the Rings part one to parts two and three, and had
been to Valencia, ‘the mullet capital of Europe’, I
chortled. Then I asked her, a student, what masters she
was studying. ‘Politics’, came the reply. ‘Wow, that
sounds interesting.’ I braced myself for what I knew
was coming. ‘So where do you stand?’ she eagerly
inquired. ‘Pretty much on the right’, I replied. I’m not
exaggerating when I say her face twitched in horror.
‘What, so you read The Daily Mail do you?’ ‘No, The
Telegraph mainly’, ‘well it’s basically the same.’ There
followed a display of righteous indignation, and several
exclamations of the word ‘disgusting’, amid halfsuccessful attempts by me to get a word in edgeways.
After a conversation that established that, incredibly,
despite her background, she couldn’t name a single
writer on either paper, I was left to reflect on the irony
of the situation. It is precisely those that attack the
Daily Mail most for its alleged ignorance, intolerance
and scare-mongering, that are often most guilty of those
same traits. Why would you complain so much about a
medium whose contact with the general public depends
entirely on that public’s willingness to encounter it? It’s
not like Newsnight, Question Time, Panorama, Have
I got News for You, or Mock the Week, all of which
14
are easily accessible to anyone flicking channels on a
TV, and paid for by an obligatory license fee. No-one
accidentally picks up a copy of the Mail. It is read by
people enjoying a freedom of choice which the left
always claims to be so keen on, except when it’s not.
So why else does the Daily Mail come in for such
abuse? Some of the accusations that are levelled at
it are fair, such as that of a tendency to hyperbole,
but then, it is a tabloid for goodness sake – that is its
raison d’être. Other accusations are further from the
mark, like the firmly-held belief in some quarters that
it is misogynist and racist. It is far too successful a
publication to be either, and when you consider that
most of its readers are women, and that it was the Mail’s
campaign that brought Stephen Lawrence’s killers to
trial, such charges are laughable.
What self-professed Mail haters perhaps object to
most is that, as the girl at the party correctly identified,
it is right-wing, and worse still, popular. The Mail’s
nastiness, if we can call it that, is a direct result of
being on the right, yet it is precisely that nastiness
that is its strength, as well as its weakness. The whole
appeal of the right is in the Shakespearean idea of
being cruel to be kind, and in holding incompetence,
hypocrisy and vanity to account. The truth hurts. It is
not just easy targets, such as the police, politicians,
bankers and Catholic priests who should be scrutinised,
but protected groups, like nurses, teachers, social
workers or disability benefit claimants. How dare
anyone suggest otherwise. Of course, if you do openly
criticise those from the ‘special’ group you won’t win
any brownie points at any smart social gatherings,
but then as Peter Hitchens, that icon of Mail on
Sunday enthusiasts, wrote recently, ‘the truth is its
own reward.’ The funny thing is that if you go to The
Guardian comment page on the website, you will read
the following quote from a former editor: ‘Comment
is free, but facts are sacred’. As if. The modern day
Guardian wouldn’t know a fact if it punched it in the
face. Try telling any unpalatable fact to a Guardian
reader, such as the fact that mass immigration has
driven down pay for low earners through flooding the
market with cheap labour, and stand back and watch
the fireworks.
The great thing about The Mail is that it is constantly,
and pluckily, pointing out that the emperor has no
clothes, and does not treat an issue with the reverence
of some of its broadsheet cousins. An example came
recently at the inquest into Mark Duggan’s death,
which found the police had not committed an unlawful
act in shooting him dead, an act which sparked the
aforementioned riots. Some commentators implied
neutrality ‘Mark Duggan: Calm, devoted family man
or drug-dealing gangster?’ led the Metro, whereas
The Mail, though far from perfect, is nothing less
than the right’s front line troops in the battle for public
opinion. When the Russell Brands of this world display
a thinly disguised hatred for its readers, there is a
very strong political agenda at work. The publication
deserves the vocal backing of those who share the main
thrust of its commentary on current affairs, not simply
a cowardly claim of indifference. I am a Daily Mail
supporter. Are you?
others came out against the boys in blue : ‘No justice,
no peace’, read the headline of Al Sharpton in The
Guardian. The Mail, on the other hand, through Richard
Littlejohn, adjudged, ‘Duggan was a gangster, not
Nelson Mandela.’ Such a headline may be crude, facile,
sensationalist and inflammatory, but speaks for millions,
and is effective in its simplicity. Why should the strong
views of Duggan’s family and supporters be the only
ones that are allowed to be expressed on an issue which
is of national importance, particularly when theirs is
totally unrepresentative of the silent majority?
Jan Ball is a new contributor.
back to contents
Operation Sovereign Borders
Daryl McCann
O
second phase involved something far more dramatic.
The so-called Pacific Solution sought to relocate
asylum-seekers arriving courtesy of people smugglers
in detention centres on island nations in the Pacific
Ocean. The Australian Defence Forces had the task
of intercepting incoming vessels so the passengers on
board never made it to Australian territory in the first
place. The government, in addition, excised thousands
of islands from Australia’s migration zone to enforce
their audacious policy. Anyone paying money to a
people smuggler operative was far more likely to wind
up on Nauru and Papua New Guinea than Australia.
The Pacific Solution not only brought a halt to the
people-smuggling business but enjoyed bi-partisan
support among the mainstream political parties,
despite infuriating Australia’s leftist commentariat.
Labor (Australia’s centre right Socialist Party) stayed
the course until Kevin Rudd became Leader of the
Opposition in 2006. Rudd has something of the Tony
Blair about him, plausibly pragmatic on the surface
and yet a progressive at heart. He might have wanted
Howard’s working class ‘battlers’ voting ALP again,
but in practice he was less a traditionalist than a trendy,
globe-trotting internationalist who coveted the top job
in the United Nations. Border security was all well
and good but Labor, in the opinion of Rudd, needed
a vision that reached beyond Howard’s reactionary
populism. He went to the 2007 federal election as a
fiscal and social conservative who was more liberalminded than John Howard on border security. In early
2008, Rudd’s liberal-minded Labor administration
abandoned the Pacific Solution, deeming it cynical,
unnecessary and costly.
The people smuggling industry took a while to
n December 15, 2010, Australians watched in
horror the televised account of a leaky Indonesian
fishing boat, with its human cargo of 89, breaking
up on the rocks of Christmas Island. At 5 am locals had
begun hearing cries for help from those aboard. Islanders
defied the treacherous swell on rocky cliffs to throw life
jackets in the direction of the shipwrecked passengers
while the Royal Australian Navy launched rescue boats.
Their efforts were mostly in vain. Fifty souls perished
at sea that morning, many of them women and children.
The night before the captain had disembarked for another
vessel leaving the fate of his charges in the hands of
Abdul Rasjid, an Indonesia fisherman without appropriate
experience or expertise. Such is the perfidy of the people
smuggling trade.
People drowning on the high seas in attempts to reach
Australia became a regular feature of news reports
between 2007 and 2013. The Indian Ocean can be
treacherous; the waves sometimes 5 to 6 metres high
and on occasion as much as 12 metres. Eight people
drowned off Java in December 2011 trying to make it
to Australia, another 8 died off Malaysia in February
2012, and so on. The greatest single disaster occurred
in December 2011 when as many as 200 people
drowned after their boast capsized in the waters off
eastern Java. Even these calamities might not tell the
whole story of the catastrophe that ensued after Prime
Minister Kevin Rudd undid the tough border policies
constructed by the conservative government of John
Howard (1997-2007).
The first four years of Howard’s programme mostly
consisted of increasing the number of detention centres
throughout Australia, a programme initiated by Paul
Keating’s Labor government (1993-97). However, the
15
recover from the Howard years. In 2008, for instance,
there were only 161 irregular maritime arrivals. By the
time Labor was thrown out of office in 2013 the total
figure ran to an astonishing 50,000. Labor apologists
refused to concede any causal relationship between
Rudd’s ill-conceived policy change and a resurgence
of the people smuggling industry. Nevertheless, an
acknowledgement of sorts came when Julia Gillard
mounted a coup against Kevin Rudd and went to the
2010 federal election pledging to build an Australianfinanced detention centre on East Timor. There would,
of course, be no return to Howard’s Pacific Solution
under any government she led. East Timor, as we know,
is not located in the Pacific Ocean. After grabbing back
the prime-ministership in time to lose the September
2013 election, Kevin Rudd was promising to re-open
detention facilities in New Guinea. Neither Rudd nor
Gillard ever admitted the dismantling Howard’s Pacific
Solution had been a mistake.
More than a thousand people drowned at sea during
the Rudd-Gillard years. This had a sobering effect on
some sections of the ALP and accounts for the party’s
belated attempts to initiate ersatz versions of Howard’s
policy. On the other hand, the Australian Greens,
Labor’s more radical coalition partner between 2010
and 2013, countenanced no criticism for their part in
the dismantling of the Pacific Solution. Any attempt
to stem the arrival of boat people, in the opinion of the
Greens, marked Australia out as racist and xenophobic.
The Greens and their supporters confuse the 50,000
asylum-seekers with the millions classified by the
United Nations as refugees. The ALP dropped this
canard in their final year in government and began
using the more accurate term ‘irregular maritime
arrivals’. Refugees do not pay thousands of dollars to
disreputable businessmen and then fly halfway around
the world to such countries as Indonesia.
Abbott announced Operation Sovereign Borders
immediately after winning the September 2013 federal
election. His first overseas destination was Djakarta,
to enlist President Yudhoyono’s help in ending the
people-smuggling trade. Abbott assured Yudhoyono
that the Royal Australian Navy’s assignment to tow
unscheduled seaworthy vessels from whence they came
would not infringe Indonesia’s sovereignty. The rapport
between Abbott and Yudhoyono was obvious, but the
meeting occurred before the ABC, in conjunction
with the Australian Guardian, revealed that a branch
of Australia’s intelligence service had eavesdropped
Yudhoyono and his wife during Rudd’s time in office.
The campaign against the government’s tougher
border policy has been waged by the Left on two fronts,
the Greens concentrating on the iniquity of Operation
Sovereign Borders, thus allowing the (relatively) more
16
pragmatic ALP partisans to focus on the supposed
technical flaws of the policy. The latter have had
the worst of it simply because Operation Sovereign
Borders has already started to achieve the same kind
of results as Howard’s tough border control. Common
sense should tell us that people smugglers are always
going to find it harder attracting customers when their
high-priced service not only involves the possibility
of death on the high seas, but also the likelihood of
spending years in a remote detention centre a long way
from the shores of Australia.
Labor envisions Operation Sovereign Borders
damaging Abbott by causing a breakdown in relations
or even a war between Indonesia and Australia. During
his brief return to power in mid-2013, Kevin Rudd
made the following claim: ‘I am very concerned about
whether if Mr Abbott became prime minister and
continues that rhetoric and that posture and actually
tries to translate it into reality. I really wonder whether
he is trying to risk some sort of conflict with Indonesia.’
There are moments, such as the Royal Australian
Navy accidentally breaching Indonesian territorial
waters, when Rudd’s dark fantasy seems not entirely
unfeasible. Fortunately, there appears to be a growing
appreciation on the part of President Yudhoyono
and his advisors that Abbott’s plan to thwart people
smugglers is a matter of Australian sovereignty no
less than Indonesian sovereignty. Operation Sovereign
Borders, in other words, could improve relations
between the two countries rather than undermine them.
Labor politicians are hoping that will not be the case.
The Australian Greens might only attract 10-15
per cent of the nation’s voters, but their advocates
dominate virtually every cultural and literary institution
in the country, from the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation (ABC) to the Australian Council for the
Arts. Unscheduled maritime arrivals are dwindling
and Australia has not gone to war with Indonesia, but
this is all beside the point for the supporters of the
Greens. Operation Sovereign Borders, according to
these ideologues, is a war against refugees. Australians
are racist, goes the cry, even if the nation annually
welcomes more than 100,000 newcomers from all
parts of the globe, including actual UN-registered
refugees. Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young and
her chums are on constant alert for any mistreatment
of the asylum-seekers being towed back to Indonesian
waters by the Royal Australian Navy. The failure to
substantiate any such abuse does not prevent them
treating each new risible claim made by a thwarted
asylum-seeker as genuine.
ABC personality Daniel Golding has not been alone
in making this analogy: ‘Australia’s refugee problems
should be compared, regularly and specifically, to
Nazism and the Holocaust.’ Ideological purity serves
as both a weapon to bludgeon the xenophobic foe and
as a shield against the slings and arrows of outrageous
reality. After the December 2011 tragedy, in which 200
people lost their lives, Hanson-Young was asked if she
accepted any responsibility for the deaths: ‘Of course
not. Tragedies happen, accidents happen.’
Daryl McCann is a frequent contributor to Quadrant
and other Australian magazines. http://darylmccann.
blogspot.co.uk
back to contents
The Recantation of Eeyore
Theodore Dalrymple
C
onservatives should enjoy life: for if they do I have a small collection of books on the dangers of
not why should they wish to preserve anything immoderate reading by those who do not know why
from the ravages of incontinent change? The they read, or who read to waste the time that will soon
only alternative is the Eeyore position, that bad as end by wasting them.
things are they can only get worse: yet such a position
This brings me naturally to Richard II who
cannot possibly survive honest reflection. We do not complained that in his earlier life he wasted time and
live in the worst of times in all respects, or even in any time was now revenging itself upon him (of which of
respect; for in many respects things were worse only us is this not true?). The play is a favourite of mine and,
a few short years ago and all were worse at some time thanks to the technology that relays trash and tradition
in the past. A wise providence, therefore, has given with equal facility, I was able to attend, within two
us much to be thankful for, but with still enough to hundred yards of my home, a wonderful production
complain about that our faculty of disgruntlement – of that play by the Royal Shakespeare Company in a
that constant source of delight and amusement – need cinema called the Majestic. For once the name seemed
never wither.
appropriate.
It takes an imaginative knowledge of
Conservatives often
I was fearful that the
history, and also a conscious willingness
rather regretfully concede
relay of a play direct from
to consult one’s own memory, to be
that technical improvement
the theatre to the cinema
grateful for advantages presently enjoyed.
has indeed taken place,
would give but a pale
but believe nevertheless
simulacrum of the thrill of
that the quality of life has declined, mainly because the live theatre and that the immediacy of contact with
manners and morals have declined. There is substance the stage would be lost; but my fears were groundless.
to this complaint, and even technical improvement or I have seldom had so Aristotelian a catharsis watching
material enrichment brings its own discontents. For a play. It was necessary that the performance be live
every hour that we do not spend nowadays trying for the effect, but it lost nothing in the electronic
to coax life into or out of our unreliable motor cars transmission; on the contrary.
we spend two in traffic jams. Every car the more is
One saw close-up – and for myself I was lost in
a parking space the less. The easy accessibility of admiration for the actors who were of a superb standard,
beautiful landscapes or once-remote cultural treasures and who passed this most exacting test of their skill,
destroys their charm. To enjoy peace, beauty and for their every gesture was under the unforgiving eye
solitude at the same time has become very difficult in of the camera, mostly quite close-up. They had to get
mass society and the privilege of the extremely rich.
it right there and then, and they did. One saw, as if for
Yet it is not true that the quality of our lives has the first time, acting as the great art that it is. At the end
in all humanly important respects declined, not at of the performance I, and everyone else in the audience
least if we are wise. Modern technology is capable in the Majestic Cinema, felt privileged to have seen it.
of enriching our lives enormously, and if it does not
It helped, of course, that the director of the production,
do so the blame is with us, not with the technology. who is also that of the company itself, obviously
There never was a time when wisdom in the use of considered Shakespeare greater than himself, and so
means was unnecessary and a rich life came by itself; viewed his task as bringing the greatness of this play
17
– its poetry, its pathos, its political subtlety – as fully a conscious willingness to consult one’s own memory,
into the minds of the audience as possible. In this I have to be grateful for advantages presently enjoyed. I
no doubt that he succeeded. The scenery, apparently, hope I will be forgiven a small example from my
took advantage of technological innovation, but not in own experience. I feel fortunate indeed to have lived
the spirit of drawing attention to itself so as to arouse through the development of the internet without having
the crude wonderment of the audience, as Victorians grown up with it, thus quite fortuitously having had
attending a freak show; rather it was used to enhance the best of two worlds without having done anything
the aesthetic effect of the whole, as good prose (in the to deserve it. (We have done nothing to deserve most
opinion of some) should be as a pane of glass that one of what we enjoy, we receive it as a legacy rather than
does not notice as what lies beyond enters one’s mind. as a reward.)
Since nothing in this world partakes of perfection I
For one reason and another I often have to consult
had one or two quibbles: Bolingbroke’s diction, for the Dictionary of National Biography and other works
example, was not the equal of that of all the other of biographical reference, for example Munk’s Roll
actors; but so excellent was the whole that I preferred of the lives of the Fellows of the Royal College of
(unusually for me) to overlook a fault that in a lesser Physicians. I remember all too vividly the days when
production might have loomed large.
to do so I had to trudge to the nearest library that had
It was also pleasing that the audience was large, these volumes. Often when I returned I would realise
one in thirty of the population of the whole town. (In that I had omitted from my notes the (or at least a) very
another, much larger town, the demand for tickets to fact that I most needed, an omission that necessitated
two performances could
a return. The gathering of
We h a v e d o n e n o t h i n g t o d e s e r v e
not be met.) The thirst for
elementary information
m o s t o f w h a t w e e n j o y, w e re c e i v e
cultural excellence has not
was thus laborious and
it as a legacy rather than as a reward.
been entirely slaked, then,
time-consuming. Now
even in seemingly remote
all of this information is
corners of the country; and the fact that everyone who available to me at the touch of a few keys, I can even
saw it felt privileged to have done so, that they had enjoy a glass of wine as I learn about the biography of
been vouchsafed something valuable in itself, that they William Wadd (a doctor whose book On Corpulency
were not just customers receiving something in return I possess, with its wonderful illustrations by him) or
for their money, was psychologically and even morally Caradoc Evans.
uplifting. Here was something that could not just be
Of course, the internet is still inadequate for research
taken for granted, as technical progress tends to be in depth, but then I am not a scholar and what I find on
taken for granted the moment it has been made. Who it will do for my purposes, superficial as they often are.
is grateful that whooping cough is a disease (among And it is true that I miss expressing my gratitude to one
many others that could be cited) that is now a thing of of our excellent municipal library staff who cheerfully
the past, not even for most people a distant memory? (and efficiently) brought me an obscure volume of
Who is grateful that the internet is no longer dial-up reference from the bowels of the reserve, and who
and responds so rapidly to our requests (and who is reassured me that even nowadays not everyone does
not infuriated when the internet fails to work as we his job properly in the hope of earning a great deal.
have come to expect it to work, overlooking entirely
All the same, I would not go back to those days and
its quasi-miraculous quality)?
would experience the implosion of the internet, were
If I am not mistaken, then, the audience for this it ever to happen, as a wound. Thanks to it, how much
production came away feeling gratitude to the actors, I have been able to explore that I would never have
to the producers, and even to, or for, the technology that been able to explore before! So each time I look up
had made the experience possible: they had not merely the Dictionary of National Biography I remember the
paid for it. And gratitude, it seems to me, is a feeling old days, and I am not only relieved, but grateful and
essential to an enjoyable life (Cicero, I believe, said that therefore not only contented, but happy. I am not sure
it was the virtue from which all other virtues derived). whether, if I had grown up with the internet, I would
To count your blessings and not just your curses is to have felt the same. I count myself lucky.
know that things might have been different, and indeed
were different in the past; whereas to count your curses
is always to look forward to a future happy state that Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Farewell Fear,
never arrives because curses are like the heads of the published by New English Review Press
Hydra, and prevent appreciation of present happiness.
back to contents
It takes an imaginative knowledge of history, and also
18
Pointing the Racist Bone
Jane Kelly
O
n January 2nd while most of us were enjoying taking rents from those people are not paying tax on
the lazy gap before work started again, Ealing that income. The police borough commander told me
Councillor Benjamin Dennehy was preparing that if there is ever a fire there it will be catastrophic.’
court documents, fighting to save his reputation and
Dennehy also complained about on street drinking,
his idea of free speech. Last year he was accused of gaming houses, prostitution and harassment of women
racism and breaching the council’s code of conduct in the area. He had already made himself unpopular
after he criticised the Indian community in Southall, on the council by exposing fraud in the planning
west London. He was also expelled from the Tory party. department, and criticizing an Asian candidate in a
In May, he lost his case against the council in the High council election in Southall who’s slogan was: ‘Vote
Court. His new plea to the Court of Appeal, under the for me our you’ll get a woman.’
Human Rights Act in defence of free speech, in his
The day after his blog went up, he received a call
next step for justice as he sees it in the UK.
from the local conservative leader Millican saying
His ordeal began on March 12th 2012, after a full he’d been contacted about a ‘racist rant.’ He said
council meeting in which David Millican, leader of the his ‘best option’ was to suspend him immediately.
conservatives, discussed the impact of immigration Labour councillors put out a petition calling on him
on the Ealing Schools budget. According to Dennehy, to withdraw his allegations and apologise, while he
who was then a Tory councillor, £291 million out of says, sociologist Rupa Huq, parliamentary candidate
£427 million from April 2011 to March 2016 had for Labour, consulted a barrister to find out if his blog
been spent on schools. The Tories said this was, in the was illegal. He says received an email from an Indian
main, to create new school places, due to the pressure Labour councillor saying, ‘Dear Racist Dennehy, you
of immigration.
are a coward and a shame to the borough.’
‘At that point the whole chamber erupted in fury,’
Dennehy reported him to the Standards Committee
Dennehy recalls. ‘Millican and the Tories were accused for abuse, but he was cleared. ‘He was entitled to his
of racism. I got home at 11pm
opinion but not me,’ he says.
Dennehy was expelled from Tory
feeling rather fired up and wrote
Having been accused of the
party and a month after his blog was
my blog.’
heinous heresy of racism there
published, the council, where Labour
He wrote: ‘Southall is a
was only one way to go.
has a majority, held a full meeting to
constant on the public purse. It is
The on-line list of councillors
discuss ‘racism in the Tory party.’ He
home to the worst concentration
and politicians in Britain recently
asked to attend to make a statement,
of illegal immigrants in the UK.
accused of racism is long and
but was refused permission to speak.
It has gambling, drinking, drug,
varied, from the rural chap using
prostitution and crime issues unlike many other parts of Facebook after a few drinks, to the highest in the
London. He went on to comment on “a largely Indian land: March last year, an SDLP councillor in Ulster
community” who he claimed said that “they deplore complained he couldn’t understand a Scots accent
this behaviour but that very same community” he during a debate. Sinn Fein immediately accused him
suggested “exploits their own people in squalid third of racism and demanded his resignation. In October,
world living conditions in squalid bed shed, without Roly Hughes, Cirencester, Lib Dem, was wrongly
paying tax on the rental income”.’
accused of putting a racist joke on Facebook. Last
He says he was particularly concerned about squalid November Juliet Solomon, Lib Dem, Haringay accused
‘beds in sheds’ for illegal immigrants. ‘I took the line of racism for saying Cypriot women should try to
about Indians exploiting their own community from assimilate. UKIP were caught out in December, when
a young Asian illegal immigrant, reported in a BBC an old video showed Victoria Ayling from Lincolnshire
London documentary,’ he says. ‘I was not being racist apparently saying she favoured repatriation. In January,
or insulting, I’ve been on the planning committee and Cambridge Tory Mervyn Loynes, resigned after being
seen the situation for myself. It’s estimated that there accused of racism against travellers. No one is safe.
are at least 5,000 outhouses with some 20,000 people Last year the Attorney General Dominic Grieve hastily
living in them. It is more likely than not that those apologized after commenting on corruption in the
19
Pakistani community.
A glance at the teaching profession shows a similar
pattern. From Ray Honeyford in 1984 who was forced
to resign after questioning the value of multi-cultural
education, to Surrey Head teacher Erica Connor in May
2010, who left her job, accused of Islamaphobia. The
bleat of ‘racist,’ is now surely the best and easiest tool
for destroying a career, if not a life.
Dennehy was expelled from Tory party and a month
after his blog was published, the council, where Labour
has a majority, held a full meeting to discuss ‘racism in
the Tory party.’ He asked to attend to make a statement,
but was refused permission to speak. ‘The Tories on
the council sat there and accepted it,’ he says bitterly.
‘They didn’t put up a single speaker and sat there for
over an hour being berated. A unanimous motion was
passed ordering Dennehy to withdraw his comments
and apologise. The council then hired a QC and issued
a long report on the matter to which he wrote a lengthy
response. They submitted a new report and he replied
again. So the process of trying to destroy him got
underway. The Council Standards Committee sat and
said he had raised ‘legitimate issues,’ but his tone and
style were ‘unnecessarily provocative.’
English law states that ordinary people can express
an opinion, but politicians are not allowed to indulge
in common abuse. But no one accused him of being
‘abusive’ only ‘inappropriate and provocative.’ He
felt that this was such a broad restriction that it could
stop normal political debate, certainly Nigel Farage
criticizing his EU colleagues.
Dennehy, 37, is fortunate that he is self-employed
as a business development consultant, and already
an outsider. Originally from New Zealand, is married
to an Afro-Caribbean woman and is proud to have
recently fathered a mixed-race child. Rather than
meekly apologizing or stepping down, he is defiant.
‘Throughout all this no one, not even in the High Court,
has ever challenged the truth or accuracy of what I
said,’ he says. ‘I still stand by every word.’
He joined UKIP in January 2013, but says he has not
heard from Farage or received any support from them
so far. He is alone fighter in a difficult battle he believes
it may be hard to win. ‘I am up against public policy,’
he says, ‘it’s not just Labour but the Civil Service is
very left wing.’
In the High court on December 20th, the council
lawyers argued that his remarks were not political
but a personal attack on a specific community and the
judge agreed. Dennehy thinks the judge erred because
personal remarks are still legal, and politicians should
be allowed to make provocative, though not abusive
remarks.
After an initial court appearance where he defended
20
himself, he recognized that he needed help and
sent e mails to the legal departments in Oxford and
Cambridge universities, hoping a student might come
forward. His reply came from Conor Gearty, professor
of Human Rights law at the LSE, who has agreed to
assist him and even found him legal representation on
a no win no fee arrangement. In August 2012 Gearty
published a blog entitled, ‘Do as I say and not as I do:
hypocrisy and human rights British Politics and Policy.’
‘I have shone a light onto the hypocrisy of the
council,’ says Dennehy who complains of double
standards. ‘If I’d been an Indian or made those
comments about a non ethnic community it would
have been acceptable.’
Although he now has an ally Dennehy has no
illusions about the situation he’s in. ‘The council is
already asking for the papers on my appeal,’ he says.
‘They have pursued this through the courts, turning up
even if they didn’t need to, spending £5,000 on it over
the last year,’ he says. ‘They are asking me for nearly
£16,000 in legal fees, determined to bankrupt me.’
To avoid bankruptcy, he says he might finally take
the case to the European Court, which as a member of
UKIP he ‘hates.’
He will not back down on his belief in free speech,
but he is more ambivalent about Britain, his home since
2003. ‘This experience has soured my belief in the
British dream,’ he says. ‘I am too outspoken for people
in this country, and I’m not sure that I want my daughter
to grow up here the way things are going. There is a
culture of fear now, people on the council from all sides
and many members of the public support me privately
but are afraid to speak openly. Interest groups measure
themselves by how easily offended they can be, and
the state is getting deeper into people’s lives. Can you
still be free in modern Britain?
Perhaps he should not entirely despair. In July 2012,
in Poplar, East London, Labour expelled five Asian
councillors who had voted against the party in a byelection. They immediately brought the charge of
racism. As Jim Fitzpatrick, the MP for Poplar put it:
‘The accusation is stupid nonsense.’
Many of us will shout ‘Hear Hear,’ to that.
Jane Kelly worked for the Daily Mail as a celebrity
interviewer.
back to contents
Gove’s Choice
Alistair Miller
E
But can it really be that talent is a myth; that effort
and will always triumph over ability and intelligence?
The problem is that the possibility of maximising PISA
scores by imposing an academic education on all pupils
has led the likes of Schleicher, Barber and Gove to
believe that a romantic egalitarian ideal can be attained
– that academic success is within the reach of all. Yet as
Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, argues,
the simple truth is that some children ‘are just not smart
enough to succeed on a conventional academic track’.
Every teacher knows this, and to claim otherwise is glib
rhetoric. In any case, the PISA evidence bears a quite
different interpretation to the one put on it by Barber.
Though there is a great effort made in China to ensure
that all pupils attain the same basic standard at primary
school, with whole class teaching the norm (something
from which we could certainly learn), secondary
education is selective at both junior and senior high
school levels. In Singapore, pupils are selected at 11 by
academic ability and placed in streams with the higher
streams destined for university and the lower ones for
polytechnic or technical college. True, the Poles have
instituted a comprehensive academic education for all
pupils – a common academic curriculum – until the
age of 15; and since doing this, their PISA scores have
improved dramatically. But in Germany, Switzerland
and The Netherlands, who are among Europe’s top
PISA performers, pupils are streamed from the age
of 11 or 12 according to their academic ability and
attend a range of different secondary schools. There
will therefore be 15-year-olds taking the PISA test
in these countries whose education is predominately
vocational; pupils who, in addition to being literate
and numerate (and able to score well on PISA tests),
will have begun to master a craft, develop practical
expertise and judgement, and gain a sense of self-worth
and self-respect.
In England, much is made of the academic success of
the flagship academies, with Sir Michael Wilshaw, the
Chief Inspector, going so far as to describe Mossbourne
Academy – his former school – as ‘a grammar school
with a comprehensive intake’. But this assumes that
gaining five or more ‘good GCSEs’ is the benchmark
of academic success. When the benchmark is changed
to five good GCSEs in the hard academic subjects of
the ‘English Baccalaureate’, Mossbourne’s score drops
dramatically from 82 to 29 per cent of pupils; most
ducational dovecotes all over the world
have been set a-flutter by the publication of
the OECD’s three-yearly league tables of
educational attainment of 15-year-olds across 65
countries in mathematics, science and reading. The
results seem to reinforce the idea that talent is a myth.
All you have to do is to give everybody a chance and
all will have prizes. How far does Michael Gove go
along with this?
Known as PISA (Programme for International
Student Assessment) – the OECD’s findings put the
likes of China (represented by Shanghai and Hong
Kong), Singapore and South Korea at the top of its
tables. European countries lag behind, with Finland,
‘the great white hope’ dropping down the table, while
the Poles have moved up. Since instituting a series
of radical educational reforms back in 1999, Poland
has leapfrogged up the table to come in 14th place in
Mathematics, 9th in Science, and 10th in Reading, with
the promise of more yet to come. The UK came 21st in
Science, 23rd in reading and 26th in Mathematics. No
wonder that Michael Gove announced in Parliament
that ‘our performance in these league tables has been,
at best, stagnant, and at worst declining’ and that our
children are being left behind ‘in the global race’.
For Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s deputy
education director (once described by Michael Gove
as ‘the most important man in English education’),
the message is that the most successful countries are
those that give all pupils, not just an elite, a good
education – and this seems to be the general view.
In Britain, something of a cross-party consensus
is emerging that so long as there are suitably high
expectations, all pupils can succeed academically;
that comprehensive education founded on a common
academic curriculum is the way forward. Gove has
been particularly impressed by high performing Poland
with its core academic curriculum: ‘our introduction
of the English Baccalaureate ... matches Poland’s
ambition by embedding an expectation of academic
excellence for every 16-year-old’. And for Michael
Barber, Tony Blair’s former education guru, the PISA
results reinforce the message that ‘talent’ is a myth:
‘those countries that believe that some are born smart
or bright while others aren’t, and reinforce that through
the education system, will never be among the top
performers’.
21
grammar schools and selective independent schools aptitudes could thereby be met and the trials of
score close to 100 percent on both.
selection avoided.
To many, the obvious solution is to re-introduce
Given Gove’s pronouncements on an academic
grammar schools. However, that the 11-plus was a curriculum, the chances of any of this happening
very crude test indeed of academic ability and that would seem to be remote; and yet actions speak louder
those who failed it (necessarily the vast majority) were than words. In October, the government announced
all too often dispatched to inferior secondary moderns plans for 40 more University Technical Colleges (to
for ‘warehousing’, is often overlooked. To call for a supplement the existing 29) offering a mix of workreturn to this system – for the casting of the majority based training and core academic lessons for 14 to
of children effectively into outer educational darkness 19 year-olds. In effect, the government is instituting
– has the makings of electoral suicide. Also overlooked vocational education on the continental model at upper
is the impossibility of measuring with any precision a secondary level. Specialisms range from engineering
child’s aptitude for an academic education. Though it and construction to ‘hospitality and leisure’, ‘gaming
is fairly obvious that pupils
and digital media’ and
But in Germany, Switzerland and The
with IQs of 85 and 125
‘hair and beauty’. There
Netherlands, who are among Europe’s top PISA
(say) differ quite markedly
is predictable opposition
performers, pupils are streamed from the age
in their academic aptitudes,
from teaching unions, who
of 11 or 12 according to their academic ability
this is not at all clear for
can recognise the thin end
and attend a range of different secondary
pupils whose IQs lie either
of a wedge when they see
schools. There will therefore be 15 yearside of 115 (roughly the
it; any deviation from the
olds taking the PISA test in these countries
cut-off for grammar school
egalitarian ideal will not
whose education is predominately vocational
selection) – and yet the two
be tolerated. But having
would get quite different
recognised that pupils do
educations. If we take into account variability of in fact differ significantly in aptitude (at least from
IQ over time (IQ is relatively stable but not fixed), the age of 14), the logical next step would be to ‘roll
variability in pupil performance on particular tests on out’ the programme nationwide, so that instead of a
particular days, and the contribution of motivation and mere 30,000 pupils benefiting, all pupils would have
effort to academic performance (pupils differ markedly the option of undertaking apprenticeship training. And
in these, as all teachers know), we have to allow that having recognised that pupils differ in their aptitude
pupils within a considerable band width of IQ scores for academic study, why not also institute state schools
could have quite similar chances of succeeding at or colleges that offer a genuinely academic education?
academic study – or might benefit from undertaking a And since it is somewhat impractical to transfer from
mix of academic and vocational study. A band width secondary school to college at 14, why not do what
as narrow as 107 to 123 (115 plus or minus 8) would they do in Germany and The Netherlands, which is to
encompass one quarter of all pupils.
transfer at 11 or 12, follow a common curriculum for
Instead, therefore, of reintroducing selection by an two or three years, and then offer a choice of vocational
11-plus exam (as instituted in the 1944 Education or academic tracks?
Act), it would be much better to follow the example of
Where does Michael Gove stand on all this? Back
Germany and the Netherlands. There, selection takes in 2010, he told a ‘Friends of Grammar Schools’
into account the views of parents, teachers and children parliamentary reception that ‘my foot is hovering over
as well as test results; and there is an orientation stage the pedal’ about the expansion of academic selection.
of some two years during which pupils follow broadly Since then, he has advocated an academic curriculum
the same curriculum and can be transferred between for all pupils. Now he is planning an expansion of
schools. As George Walden noted in We Should Know technical schools for 14 year-olds. Sooner or later,
Better, selection is practised ‘less on grounds of raw Gove will have to bite the bullet and choose. Can he
ability than of aptitude demonstrated in practice’. The give prizes to all, or is the world, as it always has been,
other requirement would, of course, be to have a high divided into rude mechanicals and their masters?
quality alternative to grammar schools in the form of
technical schools that offer, not half-baked state-run Alistair Miller is a teacher
back to contents
classroom-based vocational GCSEs or equivalents,
but proper work-based apprenticeships. Alternatively,
schools might well cease to exist altogether in their
traditional form and pupils might attend different
institutions on different days. A range of needs and
22
The New Spice Road?
S V Aldred
M
y first year out of university was spent selling
perfume in Kazakhstan. I was offered the
job on Oxford High Street by a Cypriot
businessman named Typhoon. Trusting providence
– I had no job lined up and as this fitted the bill of
divine intervention rather smartly – I accepted. Shortly
afterwards I found myself on a ’plane to the Kazakh
capital of Astana with no formal training, no interest
in perfume, and no knowledge of the native tongue.
Anything to avoid moving back in with my parents.
I arrived with a few preconceptions. Kazakhstan
was a dictatorship. President Nursultan Nazarbayev
had been in charge since the collapse of the USSR
and had recently been made Kazakhbashi (Father of
all Kazakhs), putting the aging leader and his family
above the law. Kazakhstan was oil rich – though this
wealth was concentrated in the hands of the oligarchs
and the President’s friends, or rather the oligarchs who
were the President’s friends. Kazakhstan was also the
setting of Sacha Baron Cohen’s hit 2006 film Borat,
which portrayed the country in such a negative light
that it was banned until the ministry of tourism decided
that any publicity was good publicity and thanked
Borat for ‘putting Kazakhstan on the map’.
Arriving by air allows the traveller to appreciate the
extent of Astana’s remoteness, and the vastness of the
arid, featureless Steppe in which it sits. Formerly empty
but for a Soviet era gulag, Astana has been entirely
rebuilt since 1998 – seemingly modelled on what
science-fiction writers in the middle of the last century
anticipated the world would look like by the year 2000;
all chrome and flashing lights and oddly tapering
skyscrapers. It’s all a bit nouveau riche; particularly
the football-pitch sized ‘dancing’ fountain that spurts
multi-coloured jets of water in time to Mozart. Or
the Bayterek monument, where visitors are invited
to ‘shake hands with the president’ by placing their
hands inside an imprint of Nazarbayev’s, causing the
national anthem to play. President Nazarbayev himself
claims personal responsibility for much of the city’s
architecture, which tells you a thing or two about the
man’s taste.
I fell for this ridiculous city and spent a very happy
year there. I arrived alone but I was never left to be
lonely. Although collectively suspicious of foreigners,
Kazakhs are proudly hospitable to their guests,
extravagantly so given their poverty. As a young Brit I
was treated as both VIP and curiosity, and was invited
to be a talking point at parties almost as often I was
stopped by the police on account of my suspiciously
un-Kazakh clothing. One evening I was invited to
appear on state television just so the presenters could
boast of having a real live Anglichanin on the show.
Then there were the ex-pats – garrulous oilmen and
their charming, bored wives. Embassy workers and
the US Marine Corps, always up for finding drinks
and girls. The Sisters of Calcutta and Fr Pavel,
administering to the homeless who were left to die in
the Steppe. Missionaries, students, travellers and of
course businessmen like me – looking to cash in on
this vast new market.
Yet for all its exotic charm, and despite its status as
an ‘emerging economy’, it soon becomes apparent that
Kazakhstan is not an easy market to crack. Its economy
is relatively strong, but even if one ignores the extent
to which this is reliant on the nation’s vast oil reserves
(what Kazakhs call ‘the Arab curse’), it takes more
than the prospect of an untapped market to make an
attractive business venture.
Firstly there is the suspicion of foreigners. One
cannot blame the Kazakhs for this. During the Soviet
era what is now Kazakhstan was used as a nuclear
testing ground. Subsequent border disputes with the
neighbouring ’stans and with China – as well as sneers
and chortles from the West – have helped to solidify
this distrust of outsiders. This makes it very hard to
find willing business partners, especially when one
considers the language barrier. Since independence
the Kazakh language, forbidden under Soviet rule,
has become the language of state. This has led to a
confusing situation where the over-60s struggle to
understand their own government and children. It is
worse for outsiders, where knowledge of Russian is no
longer always sufficient for business purposes.
Corruption presents perhaps the largest problem
for the Western businessman. An awful lot of bribes,
known as ‘co-operation – incentivizers’, get passed
around in Kazakhstan, and within a year the venture
collapsed under the weight of this attempted extortion.
Finally, one must consider how unattractive a
prospect it is for Western businessmen to work in a
city like Astana. Its artificiality is cloying. There are
few bars and clubs. There are no cute cafés. There is
one museum – dedicated to the story of the President’s
23
rise to power. Soldiers patrol the city and will ask for
bribes if you have forgotten your ID card. Astana is
deceptively small for all its pretentions – the locals
call it One Tenth of Vegas. If you walk far enough
you meet the Steppe and realise how isolated you
are; a claustrophobic experience. In the winter the
temperature drops below -30°C and the pavements
crack. Even the fish in the artificial river die when
it freezes down to its bed. One gets the distinct
impression that people are not meant to live here.
It is for these reasons that we ought to be sceptical
when told for the umpteenth time that the future
lies in the East. The simple fact is that places like
Kazakhstan are not attractive places for Western
businesses to invest – their value lies in cheap labour
and ready raw materials. Westernisation will cause
the cost of the former to rise, whilst the latter will
deplete. Economically as well as culturally perhaps
our statesmen and commentators are too hasty in
heralding the decline of the West and the inexorable
rise of the East.
Sam Aldred teaches Russian History at Brighton
College.
back to contents
An Ancient Church
His Grace Bishop Angaelos
T
he Coptic Orthodox Church is one of the ancient
Churches of the world, founded by Saint Mark
the Apostle and Evangelist in the 1st Century,
and is currently the largest Christian denomination
in the Middle East. The word ‘Copt’ is derived from
the Greek word Aegyptus meaning ‘Egypt’ but is now
more widely used to refer to the indigenous Christians
of Egypt. Copts today consist predominantly of these
indigenous Egyptians but are also joined by believers
from various backgrounds and ethnicities who join the
Church worldwide.
The Church starts its calendar in the year 284
AD, marking the beginning of the rule of Emperor
Diocletian, during which hundreds of thousands, if not
millions, of Christians lost their lives for their Faith.
The second strong wave of persecution then came with
the Islamic conquest in the 7th Century.
Even throughout the 20th Century, the pattern of
discrimination and systematic persecution at the
hands of both state and non-state actors continued to
exist, making Coptic Christians not only a minority
in the numerical sense, but even more so in terms
of the exclusion and marginalisation that have been
at the heart of their treatment as citizens of Egypt.
In recent decades, concurrent with the rising trend
of Islamisation, there has been an increase in the
persecution of and attacks against Christians.
While many are looking at the Middle East from
a particular perspective, it is worth noting that the
Christian experience is very different. It is one that
is not purely based on current situations, political
history or strategic theory, but on a knowledge and
24
confidence that their Faith is not merely lived within
the walls of their Churches, but becomes both their
compass and their protective reassurance through this
historic journey.
As the years following the January 2011 uprising
have shown, the Christian community and other
minority groups such as Bahá’ís, Jews and Muslim
groups such as Sufis and Shiites, bear an even heavier
burden in times of political instability and changes
in leadership. Their suffering seems to increase
significantly, extending beyond ongoing persecution
on a daily basis. The frequency of recent attacks on
Christians and minority groups, their communities and
places of worship is increasingly disturbing. Carried
out by radical elements in society, these attacks are not
merely on individuals but on the Christian and minority
presence in its entirety. Those intolerant to religious
minorities are partly enabled by the breakdown in law
and order and the growing culture of impunity that
Egypt has witnessed in previous years. Moreover,
the persecution of religious minorities over the past
decades has not manifested itself solely in physical
attacks, but has frequently been embedded in process
and policy.
At the end of June 2013, the discontent of the
Egyptian people with Mr Mohammed Morsi’s shortlived presidency sparked nation-wide protests initially
calling for early presidential elections, and once
ignored, calling for him to step down. This was referred
to by many as Egypt’s ‘second uprising’. After the
removal of Mr Mohammed Morsi and the dispersal of
protester sit-ins calling for his return, an unprecedented
wave of violence erupted against Christians. They
became scapegoats and were erroneously blamed
and accused of instigating or contributing to the
violent dispersal of pro-Morsi demonstrators. These
accusations subsequently led to the destruction,
looting and burning of over one hundred churches and
Christian properties across the nation in the space of
only a few days.
In their commitment to living their Christian values
however, Christians did not retaliate, demonstrating
great resilience and an unshakable Faith.
In yet another transition of leadership following
these events, a new draft of the constitution was put
forth by a committee appointed under current interimpresident Mr Adly Mansour, and was approved by 98.1
per cent of voters in a third constitutional referendum
on 14 and 15 January this year. The turnout, 38.6 per
cent of the electorate, was higher than expected. As
this year’s referendum results suggest, the new draft,
while still not perfect, is viewed in many ways as a
welcome improvement to the 2012 constitution, which
was drafted by an Islamist-dominated Constituent
Assembly and stood as a potential hindrance to the
advancement of religious freedom.
To successfully lead Egypt into this new formative
era, its reform agenda must be geared towards the
unassailable principle of equal citizenship, meaning
equal rights and equal accountability before the law.
This development will not only prevent potential
institutional discrimination, but set a clear precedent
for those who may have previously enjoyed impunity.
With prospective presidential and parliamentary
elections drawing nearer, state delivery on its promise
to uphold democratic principles must become a reality,
which is possible only if these principles are not merely
enshrined in the constitution, but are also reflected in
the dealings of the state with its citizens. First and
foremost, true equality would entail dealing with
citizens on the basis that they are Egyptian before being
anything else; man or woman, young or old, secular or
religious, Bahá’í, Christian or Muslim.
Constitutional and leadership changes however
are only the beginning. Change, deeply rooted in
truth and justice, must occur in society as a whole,
moving beyond the political and legal dimensions of
citizenship. From a Christian perspective, true change
occurs in and through Christ, for ‘if anyone is in Christ,
he is a new creation’ once ‘old things have passed
away; behold, all things have become new’. We see
that newness or change in Christ ultimately leads to
reconciliation. ‘Now all things are of God, who has
reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and
has given us the ministry or reconciliation, that is, that
God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself’.
Throughout their contemporary history, Christians
have often been accused of being traitors to their
Egyptian homeland and portrayed as loyal to
negatively perceived powers, whether domestic
or foreign. Even in the midst of this, the Christian
presence has, particularly in recent years, shown to
be one that can bring true change towards peace, hope
and reconciliation. There is no greater testimony to
the peaceful presence of Christians than their restraint
and lack of retaliation in the midst of waves of violent
attacks and the hardship of persecution.
The Christian community has historically been and
will remain an essential component and contributor
to the well-being of Egypt. The great message of
hope lived by Christians in the Middle East, first
and foremost founded upon the love, goodness and
promises of God, furthers their evident willingness to
continue to participate in, and contribute to, the process
of nation-building and reform.
For this reason Christians always remain hopeful.
While experiencing the greatest hardships and facing
the greatest obstacles, Christians in Egypt are mindful
of the challenge that comes through living their Faith.
They do not see themselves as victims, nor do they
like to be treated as such, but are resilient in living
their lives based on their Christian ethos and confident
that they are supported and strengthened by a mighty
divine Hand that has kept them for millennia. It is
with this outlook that the words of Saint Paul become
particularly pertinent, explaining the ethos of Christian
life when he says:
We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed;
we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but
not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed – always
carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord
Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested
in our body.
The Christian presence will continue to play a crucial
role in Egypt, and in the wider Middle East region, not
only as they join their fellow citizens in proactively
working towards an inclusive and better nation, but
as true ambassadors of Christ, being true examples
of reconciliation and forgiveness; being light of the
world and salt of the earth as requested of us by our
Lord Jesus Christ.
His Grace Bishop Angaelos is General Bishop of the
Coptic Orthodox Church in the United Kingdom
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25
Gray’s Anatomy
Patricia Morgan
N
ot long ago we were told that our gardens were
a refuge for wildlife because industrialized
farming had banished it from the countryside.
No longer. Concrete, paving, gravel and ‘grandma’s
grave’ slate chippings have taken over the sizeable front
gardens where I live, and not because of cars needing
the space. Elsewhere, in street after street, the only
frontal features are hideous wheelie bins. Now they
have hi-viz lids; perhaps to prevent people falling in?
Never mind that I am supposed to be in a conservation
zone. Instead,
the abolition
o f g r e e n e r y,
despite its
positive, proven
effect on raising
mood, damping
aggressiveness
and controlling
pollution, turns
everything to
sludge. Never
mind that water
with nowhere
to sink ends up
dumped with
sewage in the
Thames.
There are no insects for creatures to eat and no
blossoms for bees. Make your way to the back gardens
and you will find a haven for foxes, grey squirrels and a
diversity of crows. There were once begging blue tits,
robins, blackbirds and sparrows outside the restaurant
in Richmond Park. Now there are grey squirrels and
assorted crows that have increased nearly 100 percent
since the ‘70s. Foxes and dogs off their leads have
demolished ground nesting birds, snakes and lizards.
My middling garden used to host a multitude of frogs,
along with toads, newts, wood mice and hedgehogs.
A solitary frog might now turn up looking for a mate
but, otherwise, nothing. The Great Disappearance
started when an elderly neighbour harboured three
foxes that gobbled everything up while another woman
put sandwiches out for foxes and now shudders at
the resulting disembowelled hedgehogs. Our area is
supposed to be a special site for stag beetles, but you
26
do not see these much because the foxes dig out any
grubs the concrete has not suffocated.
Grey squirrels, unregulated by natural predators,
have displaced the little reds because they are stronger,
out-compete for food, are able to store fat throughout
the winter and carry a deadly pox virus. There are
programmes, such as one on Anglesey, to eradicate greys
and allow red populations to recover but it is a losing
battle. Grey squirrels harm native bird populations by
eating their eggs and nestlings, discourage parent birds
from using nest
boxes, occupy
the nesting
spots of owls
and hawks and
take winter
foods. They
cause increasing
damage to
broad-leafed
woods, which
end up as
scrub, rather
t h a n t i m b e r,
landscape and
habitat. This
is hardly an
effective use of
grants. The destruction of species like oak and beech is
a disincentive to planting while it is no longer possible
to plant ash, which is relatively resistant to squirrel
damage,
A report from the Royal Forestry Society to the
Forestry Commission England in its survey of 755
woodland owners and managers, concludes that grey
squirrels ‘represent the greatest threat to England’s
broad leaved woodlands, marginally ahead of tree
diseases and well ahead of deer’ and recommends that
their control be given the same priority, with funding
for more effective, co-ordinated control. Woodland
owners and managers who invest in a rigorous and
intensive regime of shooting, trapping and poisoning
are often able to minimise the damage greys do, even
if it is time-consuming and expensive. The news that
the EU will no longer allow the use of warfarin will
make an unsatisfactory situation worse.
Richmond on Thames council has declared that all number of local cases – spread by foxes’ fleas. As if my
this evidence is wrong and Wildlife Trusts are wasting council’s nonsense cannot get any worse, it advises that
their time. The grey squirrel has nothing to do with the The National Fox Welfare Society can help us provide
red’s decline. People wiped them out, so that ‘by the mangy foxes with homeopathic treatment!
1920s their population had been decimated’. Strange
Sentimentality is the mask of callousness. The
that I should remember them in Epping Forest. It then irrational, touchy-feely people invited by London
admits reds still exist ‘in some areas’, where they Boroughs to write ignorant tosh only care about
harmoniously ‘coexist with grey squirrels’, suggesting the immediately obvious ‘adorable’ foxes and grey
that greys are just harmless veggies, while avoiding squirrels while ignoring the plight of insects, birds,
mentioning their impact on birds. Richmond ‘does amphibians and small mammals. Charities like the
not support or practice lethal control’ which ‘should RSPCA have become aggressive soft toy preservation
never be undertaken by members of the public’. societies. General Sir Barney White-Spunner, head
This statement contradicts the 1981 Wildlife and of the Countryside Alliance, urges his members to
Countryside Act with its message of trap and kill grey stop giving in to such societies because they are only
squirrels, along with its reaffirmation of the illegality interested in animal rights issues such as fox hunting
of their release.
and badger culls. A BBC Countryfile programme
The council is keen to emphasize that foxes ‘are blamed hedgehog decline on cars and edited out
not vermin’ so we must practice ‘coexistence’ with mentions of badgers; their numbers have doubled since
a natural part of ‘our urban wildlife’. The story that 1970 as hedgehogs have plummeted from 30 million
foxes did not move into town, but rather ‘mirrored the to one, along with birds from lapwings to nightingales
growth in urban sprawl’ as
and other badger snacks
A report from the Royal Forestry Society
we occupied their territory
from bees’ nests to dormice.
to the Forestry Commission England in
is frequently regurgitated.
There is a lack of
its survey of 755 woodland owners and
I have always lived in
responsibility for the
managers, concludes that grey squirrels
Victorian streets on different
protection and stewardship
‘represent the greatest threat to England’s
sides of London and, until
of creation. ‘Thou has
broad leaved woodlands, marginally ahead
recently, foxes were as rare
dominion over these’ and
of tree diseases and well ahead of deer’
as unicorns in Ilford or
it is entirely in human hands
rhinos in Hounslow. I recall
whether anything lives or
many people keeping chickens in the decades after not. In a man-made landscape, there is no way to
WWII when foxes were as inconceivable as griffin ensure habitat and species survival without active
vultures. I saw my first fox on Dartmoor when I was 23. manipulation. I asked some societies who look after
The council mouths the cliché that, if foxes are the welfare of endangered species in what way the
removed, another lot will just move in. Is it stupidity animals they care was threatened by uncontrolled
or contempt for their audience to fail to see that all predation. Their reply was that ‘the balance of nature’
control is a continuous process, as with rats? Only would someday spontaneously set all aright. If it must
‘some people’ are ‘disturbed’ by the loud cries of therefore be left to nature, why do these organisations
foxes while ‘little can be done, and the nocturnal exist? They are helping to kill what they are supposed
disturbances don’t last long’ – so fine to be kept awake to protect.
by ear splitting screaming. Foxes ‘pose no real danger
We need now to replace existing animal charities with
to cats’ and ‘the actual evidence of them killing cats new organisations that are not based on emotion. Since
is extremely rare’ and in ‘most cat/fox encounters, it the grey squirrel threatens our bird life and woodland
is the fox who comes off worse’. I found the remains heritage, we must not be afraid of confronting an illof a neighbour’s cat and collar outside my back door informed public. If our backyards are to be homes for
and a friend’s sturdy tom recently escaped minus his hedgehogs, frogs and stag beetles, we urgently need
tail. What has happened is that, as the well-meaning periodic shooting of urban foxes and fines for those
animal welfare people have neutered and homed the old who feed and otherwise encourage them.
colonies of feral cats, ecological niches have opened
up for foxes making for town. You see this in Europe
where, at tourist sites, feral cats have been replaced by
packs of threatening and, possibly rabid, feral dogs.
Patricia Morgan’s forthcoming book is Marriage: its
Even if urban foxes are more likely to have mange, purposes, limits and future, Wilberforce Publications.
we are reassured that it ‘cannot easily transfer to
back to contents
humans’ despite a pest control expert telling me of a
27
Conservative Classic – 54
The God of the Machine by Isabel Paterson
Alexander G Scott
The philanthropist, the politician, and the pimp are
inevitably found in alliance because they have the
same motives, they seek the same ends, to exist for,
through, and by others.
W
hen Ronald Reagan told the American
people at the start of his presidency
that ‘Government is not the solution to
our problem: government is the problem’, he was
(probably knowingly) echoing Isabel Paterson, an
eminent Canadian-American book reviewer, novelist
and political thinker who produced such gems
as: ‘…the country which is least governed is best
governed’, ‘Government… is solely an instrument or
mechanism of appropriation, prohibition, compulsion
and extinction’; and ‘History within nations consists
of the struggle of the individual against government’.
Today, in an era when an increasing number of
politicians and commentators seem eager to describe
themselves as libertarians (whether they are or not)
such pronouncements seem relatively unexceptionable:
70 years ago, when Paterson made them, they must
have sounded blasphemous.
1943 saw the publication of notable works by each
of the three founding mothers of the modern libertarian
movement: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, Rose
Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom and Isabel
Paterson’s The God of the Machine. Taken together,
they represent a concerted assault on collectivism,
Big Government and the myth of the benevolent state.
Of the three books, Paterson’s history of human
liberty is probably the most incisive, yet the least
well known (possibly because she was dissatisfied
with it and refused to sanction a reprint). She was
undoubtedly the triumvirate’s guiding light. Ayn Rand
(who said of The God of the Machine that ‘it does for
capitalism what Das Kapital does for the Reds and
what The Bible did for Christianity’) was an acolyte,
and Paterson had a great influence on Rose Wilder
Lane (at one point even telling her where she should
live). What particularly distinguishes all three works
from most conservative writings of the time is their
clarity and originality (in Paterson and Lane’s case this
might have been the result of not having undergone
liberal brainwashing at a university), their unrestrained
28
enthusiasm for red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism, and
their verve and optimism: Paterson was convinced that
the battle to reverse the enervating state’s wasteful
diversion of energy away from the private to the public
sector was winnable.
While all three writers targeted full-blown totalitarian
systems, Paterson was particularly alarmed by
America’s acceleration under President Roosevelt
towards the sort of seemingly benign, smiley-face,
coercive political system Jonah Goldberg has termed
‘liberal fascism’. For her, the New Deal, with its mass
of interfering, big-spending government agencies
staffed by an army of left-wing social ‘experts’, had
resulted in a pernicious expansion of state power,
leading to attacks on the Constitution, the principles
of free trade, and personal liberty. Now, of course, we
realise that the New Deal did much to retard America’s
emergence from the Depression while creating the
deluded view of government as responsible for – and
capable of – solving everyone’s problems. Paterson,
who grew up as one of nine children on a Canadian
cattle ranch and had to leave school early to earn
a living, was a fierce opponent of taxpayer-funded
welfare: when she died at the age of 74, found among
her effects was her unused social security card sealed
inside an envelope with the words ‘Social Security
Swindle’ written on it.
What’s most startling about The God of the Machine
is how contemporary it feels: there is hardly a section
that doesn’t seem as relevant today as it must have
done when it was published. Perhaps because she
was writing with the memory of a global economic
upheaval still fresh in her memory, and as we’re still
suffering the turbulent after-effects of the credit crunch,
Paterson seems to be addressing many of today’s key
political and economic issues. For instance, after the
events of 2008, many modern commentators echoed her
brutal advice about how to handle economic disaster:
‘The quickest and most drastic liquidation of a credit
collapse would be the best and most equitable; because
it would most rapidly reconnect the production system;
but this is seldom allowed. Instead, the political power
is called in to seize or depreciate money; the meter is
falsified, and a general leakage all along the line is
caused. After that, no genuine recovery is possible,
unless or until this power is revoked and the general to how well he had performed in relation to his ‘innate
leakage stopped.’ Of course, many of those responsible capacities’ instead of judging ‘the specific results
for the credit crunch had studied economics: Paterson of a specific examination’ (i.e. the sort of sleightsuffered no such disadvantage.
of-hand chicanery routinely advocated by modern
As for the public’s suspicion that they – rather than leftists in order to shoehorn increasing numbers of
the perpetrators – ended up paying the price for the ‘disadvantaged’ children into top universities). She
near-collapse of the world banking system in 2008, points out that one result of these methods is that
the same thing seems to have happened in the wake of ‘the negligent child is advantaged, and the diligent,
the Wall Street Crash of 1929, about which Paterson clever, and conscientious child is deprived of an earned
(an admirer of entrepreneurs, but no lover of bankers) benefit’. In fact, Paterson rejects the principle of statehad this to say: ‘The first measure of “relief” was the controlled education altogether: ‘A tax-supported,
Reconstruction Finance Corporation; and the first compulsory educational system is the complete model
money paid out from it went to J P Morgan & Co. It of the totalitarian state.’
was the non-productive rich who first went on the dole.’
Perhaps the finest chapter in her book is ‘The
Nothing much changes, evidently.
Humanitarian With the Guillotine’ in which she
Paterson appears just as contemporary on non- contrasts the teachings of major religions – that those
economic matters. She is a fierce defender of the who seek to raise and distribute charitable funds
American Constitution against attacks by judicial shouldn’t profit from their activities – with the evident
activists (a major Tea Party theme); she dismisses the assumption of many secular compassion-mongers that
obsession with ‘human rights’ as a nonsense, arguing they have a perfect right to fill their boots (with our
that they are one and the
money) and to be regarded
What’s most startling about The God of
same as property rights;
as morally superior to the
the Machine is how contemporary it feels:
she sees the family as the
rest of us while they do
there is hardly a section that doesn’t seem
main bulwark against the
so: ‘The politicians can
as relevant today as it must have done when
encroaching power of the
get votes out of distress;
it was published. Perhaps because she
state; and she is against
the humanitarians land
was writing with the memory of a global
positive discrimination
lucrative white collar jobs
economic upheaval still fresh in her memory.
o n the basis of race.
for themselves distributing
She dismisses grandiose
relief funds; only the
government plans to ‘abolish poverty’ or to guarantee producers, both capitalists and working men, have to
‘freedom from want’ as a mere confusion of terms: take the abuse and pay the shot.’
‘The only condition in which no one can experience
I bought The God of the Machine after reading
poverty, want, or fear, is that of rigor mortis.’
this intriguing quote from it: ‘The humanitarian in
Paterson is immensely sound on another of the great theory is the terrorist in action.’ Those who have long
banes of contemporary life – ‘progressive’ education. suspected that many of the world’s problems are often
After railing against the impossibility of sacking useless made worse by those frightfully nice hand-wringing
teachers, she outlines the principles of touchy-feely, types who stand to gain the most by prolonging them
non-judgmental, child-centric educational methods will discover that Paterson agrees: ‘What kind of
(‘it forbids positive punishment; aims… to encourage world does the humanitarian contemplate as affording
self-expression’ etc.) and goes on to contrast this sort him full scope? It could only be a world filled with
of nonsense with old-fashioned teaching principles, breadlines and hospitals, in which nobody retained the
which ‘…gave the teacher sufficient authority for natural power of a human being to help himself or to
any necessary discipline. It imparted positive facts resist having things done to him. And that is precisely
and positive principles. It discouraged immature the world that the humanitarian arranges when he gets
self-expression, sought to strengthen character by his way.’ (This would certainly explain why the number
self-control against the social impulse; and attached of people judged to be in need of state charity increases
personal responsibility to any degree of emancipation exponentially when socialists are in power.)
from the rule of obedience for children. It taught the
I am not a libertarian, but anyone who claims to be
child to think by the use of formal logic on impersonal really should read The God of the Machine. Print and
examples; while contemporary issues were kept out of Kindle editions are available from Amazon, and it can
the schoolroom as far as possible.’
downloaded as a free pdf file from the Ludwig von
Paterson also addresses attempts by the liberal Mises Institute website.
establishment to impose unearned equality by means of
back to contents
a system whereby a pupil’s work was marked according
29
Reputations — 42
F W de Klerk
Christie Davies
I
n 1993 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to
the South Africans Nelson Mandela and Frederick
Willem de Klerk ‘for their work for the peaceful
termination of the apartheid regime and for laying the
foundations for a new democratic regime’. From the
news coverage at the time of Mandela’s funeral, you
would think that he alone had won the prize when in
fact de Klerk had played as important, indeed possibly
a greater, part in achieving that peaceful transition. De
Klerk has been one of the great statesmen of our time.
Both de Klerk and Mandela had had to make
fundamental changes in their political outlook to
achieve what they did. Mandela, once a seriously
violent terrorist with very strong communist
connections, trained in guerrilla warfare by
the brutal Ethiopian police, a friend of Castro,
Gaddafi, Arafat and the IRA, had become, while
in gaol, through reading and friendly interaction
with his Afrikaner prison wardens, a flexible and
moderate man willing to negotiate in good faith
with de Klerk. De Klerk, once a strong exponent
of a narrow Afrikaner nationalism that in practice
set itself against all the other peoples of South
Africa, had come to see the wrongs that stemmed
from this ideology and became an upholder of the
universal values and rights of a a society based on
democracy, property rights and the free market,
with an independent judiciary with safeguards for
minorities and a free press,
All of these were already present in some
measure in the Union of South Africa first set up
by the British South Africa Act of 1909 that sought
reconciliation after the Boer War (1899-1902).
However, the Afrikaner nationalists had sought
to hold back and frustrate the development of
these free institutions and, given that only white
people could vote, that the majority of the whites
were Afrikaners and that the franchise favoured
the rural areas where the Boer farmers lived, they
were able to succeed. Such very limited rights as
the black Africans, Indians and Cape Coloureds
had enjoyed in politics, land ownership or access
to skilled work were taken away from them or
30
severely restricted.
De Klerk’s achievement was to reverse this
process and to abandon the policy of highly
unequal separate development known as apartheid.
De Klerk held and won by a large margin a
whites only referendum in 1992 that endorsed
these changes. Crucially he had promised the
whites a colour-blind security of property and
continuity of government employment. A new
constitution followed and elections in which all
races participated. Mandela’s African National
Congress won over 60 per cent of the votes and
de Klerk’s National Party 20 per cent. Mandela
became President but de Klerk became a Deputy
President and served him loyally until his own
retirement in 1996.
De Klerk had come a long way, for there is
nothing in his early life to suggest he would one
day become the dismantler of apartheid and of
the Afrikaner civil and political order. He had
very deep Afrikaner roots and he can only be
understood by exploring his heritage in detail,
its traditions, religious beliefs and ideology. His
father had been secretary of the Transvaal National
Party and had served in the governments of three
determined upholders of apartheid, the Prime
Ministers Hans Strydom (his brother-in-law),
Henrik Verwoerd and Balthazar Vorster. These
were the years of the triumph of Afrikanerdom,
its high noon, the time when South Africa ditched
the monarchy to become a republic and then had
to leave the British Commonwealth with its hated
English and multi-racial connections.
The formative years of F W de Klerk were
spent in a strongly Christian-National social
environment where the chief end of man was the
preservation and strengthening of the identity and
boundaries of the Afrikaner nation. The Afrikaners
saw themselves as a holy people to whom God
had given a special mission. They adhered to a
Dutch neo-Calvinist theology, which asserted
that God had created many separate spheres
of life, each with its own authentic nature and
which was independent of the other spheres. In
the Netherlands itself this view had led to the
creation of a stable and equitable society, based
on separate but equal and co-operating pillars:
a Protestant pillar, a Roman Catholic pillar and
pillars for the secular liberals and socialists. Each
pillar had its own institutions including its own its
own radio and television station. In South Africa a
parallel theology underpinned apartheid, apartness
not just for whites, blacks, coloureds and Indians
but between the Afrikaners and English-speaking
settlers and immigrants. Indeed the first use of the
word apartheid was in a warning by an Afrikaner
leader to his followers not to intermarry with the
English. Backing up the theology was a sacred
history of righteous suffering that proved that the
Afrikaners were indeed an elect people. Their
great trek with ox-wagons in the 1830s away
from the liberal rule of the British government
on the coast to settle and form a new nation in the
Transvaal and the Orange Free State was identified
by them with the exodus of the Jews from Egypt
in the Old Testament. The British government
was seen as Pharoah and the black Africans who
attacked the trekkers as the Canaanites. South
Africa was dotted with monuments to those heroic
times and the Afrikaner peoples’ past struggles
were regularly remembered and celebrated next
to them on special days each year.
Along with religion, their other crucial identifier
was the Afrikaans language, which they saw as
shaping a person’s entire outlook in life. They
wanted Afrikaans to stand apart from not just
English but from the Dutch language from which
it was derived. They set up exclusively Afrikaansmedium schools for their children.
In practice the black Africans were regarded as
the sons of Ham, as hewers of wood and drawers
of water serving the Afrikaner farmers and as
unskilled labour generally. However, the highminded proponents of apartheid wanted to create
for each of the African peoples separate tribal
homelands, the Bantustans, which would in time
enjoy self-government.
This was the world in which de Klerk grew
up and was a part of and, according to his
liberal elder brother Willem, he was not inclined
seriously to question it. De Klerk was a member
of the Broederbond, a powerful and secretive
Afrikaner nationalist organization that sought
to keep pure the Christian-national ideology
and to promote Afrikaner power by placing its
members in key positions in all of South Africa’s
institutions. English speakers who had served their
country well were steadily ousted from or denied
promotion in the armed forces, and in the railways
and semi-state corporations. The latter were
created to provide jobs in industry and commerce
for Afrikaners as a way of challenging the English
speakers’ pre-eminence in these fields.
Then new visions emerged among the Afrikaners.
They did so partly because the rigidities of apartheid
were dysfunctional in a market economy and
partly because those Afrikaners who abandoned
their rural idyll to enter the expanding modern
economy became perforce the enlightened, the
verligte ones. As the enlightened Afrikaners
became more powerful in the National Party,
breakaway parties formed, first the Herstigte
(Reconstituted) National Party in 1969 and then
in 1982 the Reverend Dr Andries Treurnicht’s
Konserwatiewe Party, that went on to gain 40
per cent of the Afrikaner vote. De Klerk’s main
preoccupation at this time was to act as a unifier
holding the different wings of the National Party
together. His time of greatness was yet to come.
What made this time of greatness possible was
the crumbling of the Soviet empire followed by the
total collapse of the Soviet Union. Until that point
radical reform in South Africa might well, given
the ANC’s ties with the South African Communist
party and with Moscow and Cuba, have led to
the country going Communist and becoming
a Soviet client-state. The result would have
been a disaster for black as well as white South
Africans, as we can see from the horrible nature
and consequences of the Communist regimes
that after the overthrow of Haile Selassie ruled
Ethiopia from 1974 to 1991. Communist rule in
Ethiopia led to the total breakdown of society with
repeated famines, forced movements of population
and civil war. Apartheid was bad but Communism
was worse, as we also know from the history of
China under Mao Tse-Tung. Mrs Thatcher saw
this point very clearly, which is why she refused
to intensify sanctions against South Africa and
held negotiations with de Klerk’s predecessor, P
31
W Botha. John Major’s recent criticisms of Mrs.
Thatcher’s policies, made when he was attending
Mandela’s funeral, are completely wrong.
De Klerk’s great insight was to see that the
collapse of Soviet socialism had changed
everything and after becoming President of South
Africa in 1989 he moved rapidly and decisively to
negotiate an end to the old Afrikaner order with
Mandela and the ANC. He abandoned completely
the ideology of apartheid and dominance dear
to the Afrikaners. It was a very risky strategy.
Treurnicht’s party had been winning by-elections
in the Afrikaner heartlands where it upheld the old
faith in apartheid. De Klerk’s predecessor as State
President, P W Botha, a tepid stop-start reformer,
strongly opposed his new initiatives and de Klerk
could have lost the whites only referendum that
endorsed his new policies. The agreement he came
to with Mandela could have foundered and plunged
South Africa into the poverty, backwardness and
internal strife that characterizes much of the rest
of Africa. But greatness in a politician is based on
a willingness accuately to assess and then to take
risks, coupled with the will and ability to succeed.
De Klerk had these qualities. On this his reputation
rests. He stands with such other noted conservative
statesmen as Sir Robert Peel or Charles de Gaulle
who, when the time came, also chose to break
with the past.
Christie Davies is the author of the monograph
Apartheid versus Capitalism: the South African
contradiction, Reading 1988.
back to contents
ETERNAL LIFE
C
hristianity is concerned with the absolutes:
life and death, good and evil. This is why the
church proclaims its doctrines as true. They are
dogmas. This is necessarily the case, for what would
it mean to announce the words of life and death and to
claim to define good and evil if what was being said
were only relatively true, fairly true or, as the parody
bishop in the satirical newspaper column has it, true in
a very real sense? Sometimes I fear the parody is too
much like the reality. For over the last century-and-ahalf Christian theologians and authorities, speaking
under the influence of the so-called higher criticism,
have redefined doctrines and dogmas as metaphors or
myths to be, following David Strauss (1808-1874) and
Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976), demythologised. Thus
the bodily resurrection of Christ is identified with the
disciples’ experience of new life and the feeding of
the five thousand is a pretty story telling us that if we
share what we have it will go a long way. The Virgin
Birth becomes a fairy tale to inform us, after the style
of children’s TV programmes, that Jesus was someone
very special. These interpretations are banal.
Moreover, such reinterpretations are a travesty of the
gospel and a repudiation of all that the church has stood
for over most of the Christian centuries. Unfortunately
the modern mind recoils from such a thought. It is far
32
too undemocratic. Surely everyone is entitled to, as
they say, their own opinion, so doing as much damage
to English grammar as to the theological deposit of
faith. Usually this assertion is quickly followed by one
that amounts to palpable nonsense: that every opinion is
as valid as any other. So RE in state schools runs along
these lines: St Augustine thought this, Martin Luther
thought that, Rudolf Bultmann thought the other; what
do you think, Megan? Megan is eleven years old and
belongs to a family where no one has ever stepped foot
in a church, and there are no books in the house. What
kind of society would exist if this sort of intellectual
licentiousness were endemic? It is our sort of society
in which culture is a form of anarchy and governed,
as it were, by the slogan Absolute Relativism Rules
OK, and the word truth has no meaning. This is not a
satirical remark: I could immediately name at least six
international scholars, philosophers, theologians and
literary critics who have publicly denied the objectivity
of truth.
The alternative to this kind of nonsense is not
nonsense of another kind: there can be no refuge in
literalistic fundamentalism. Christ did not literally or
physically come down from heaven, because heaven is
not up in the sky. Neither did he ascend to the same sky.
Nevertheless, the Incarnation and the Ascension remain
rising king, or a surmise about the eternal return. Rather
the reverse is the case. Because the resurrection was
from all eternity part of God’s purpose, then it finds
reflections and echoes everywhere. In the same way, as
John Donne noticed, we find images of the crucifixion
in the crosses which appear in our window-panes and
in the outstretched arms of the swimmer.
The Trinity is an eternal truth and so it was unavoidable
that it must have found representation, however
unconsciously, in the rituals, customs and religions
of many civilisations: in those of Egypt, Assyria and
Babylon for example as well as in the thought of ancient
Greece, in Plato and the Roman Virgil. The world’s
three dimensions are the natural imprint of the brooding
Trinity which we find
also in the major and
minor triads in western
music. I am not saying
these allusions were
formed deliberately:
rather the truth of the
Trinity goes so deep
that their emergence
from a culture steeped
in Christianity – as
Europe once was – is
unavoidable.
The fact is that dogmas
are revealed by God to
the custodianship of the
church. But they come alive only when we attend to
them. We have to work at the dogmas. Revelation is
provided by God. It is for us to make sure we attune
our thoughts to them, for they are the soul of reality.
We need to develop, by prayer, meditation, worship
and the patience and comfort of God’s holy word our
eyes to see and our ears to hear.
true. Only they are more true than the literalist would
have it, not less. His coming down from heaven means
what St Paul said in the Epistle to the Philippians:
Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery
to be equal with God: But made himself of no
reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant,
and was made in the likeness of men: And being found
in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became
obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.
Similarly, His Ascension is not a rocket-propelled
ascent until he reaches escape velocity and disappears
from sight. The Ascension is the certain truth that
Christ departed this world into the nearer presence of
God, that he returned
to the realm he had
inhabited before the
Incarnation. Even St
Paul’s description of the
event is not exhaustive,
for Christian dogmas
are inexhaustible and
like icons in that they
partake of the reality
which they represent.
Both demythologising
and literalistic
fundamentalism are
forms of reductionism,
and they both interpret
Christian truth in terms
that make no sense.
Dogmas, though necessarily expressed in words,
go beyond words and they must be approached as we
approach a great painting, a wonderful symphony or,
as I said, the icon. No one would say, ‘I’ve seen the
Mona Lisa so I don’t have to look at it again.’ Or ‘Oh
yes, I heard Beethoven’s opus 130 last Wednesday at
the delightful Wigmore Hall. I now understand all there
is to understand in it.’
We contemplate such marvellous works over our
whole lifetime and still we cannot exhaust them.
And dogmas are indeed figures, but in a sense more
profound than anything conjectured by David Strauss
and Rudolf Bultmann. Let us take two dogmas for
examples and begin to scratch the surface of their
inexhaustible depth.
The resurrection is a truth permeating the whole of
creation and so we find types and shadows, hints and
suggestions of it everywhere. It is there in our daily
arising from sleep and in the return of the springtime.
The resurrection was not, as so many theologicalanthropologists of such as J G Frazer (1854-1941) of
The Golden Bough believed, a pseudo-historical fact
based on the ancient pagan ritual of the dying and
Peter Mullen is a retired Church of England priest
and a writer. His current project is a film script about
St Paul.
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33
ARTS AND BOOKS
mavericks, the Satanist Aleisteir Crowley and
the eccentric soldier Orde Wingate, came from a
background rooted in the Plymouth Brethren, a
small but fanatical set of fundamentalist Protestants.
Endowed with brains and drive, Ware transcended his
Empires of the Dead, David Crane, William Collins, humble background to become, after college in France,
first an educationalist; then an imperial administrator.
2013, £16.99p.
He was one of Lord Milner’s ‘kindergarten’ of bright
This is a book as beautiful as the cemeteries and cenotaphs young men running post-Boer War South Africa, then
it celebrates. Its subject is the creation of the British War a journalist, turning the moribund Tory Morning Post
cemeteries that circle the globe wherever this country’s into the leading organ of Edwardian Toryism, before
soldiers, sailors and airmen have laid down their lives in finally finding his true mission in the Great War.
In 1914, Ware tried to enlist in the army, and after
the two world wars and other 20th century conflicts, but
it returns again and again to the theatre and campaigns being rejected on grounds of age (he was in his midwhere the majority of the dead lie: the Western front in forties) he took charge of the Red Cross’s ambulance
service in France. He soon became aware that there was
France and Flanders in the Great War.
The hundreds of cemeteries, great and small, that no co-ordinated policy for dealing with the mounting
enhance rather than debase the landscapes in which numbers of the dead, and resolved to fashion one
himself. Crane follows Ware
they were laid down, as anyone
as he meets and overcomes
who visits them in this centenary
every obstructive hurdle thrown
year can attest, are oases of peace
against him, and as, with singleand beauty resembling an English
minded drive, he fought to give
country garden. All, whether
what he considered dignity and
tucked into the suburb of an ugly,
recognition to the unimaginably
nondescript northern French or
lengthening death roll.
Belgian town or hidden in ‘some
Ware’s great idea was that
corner of a foreign field’ are a
the dead should all be buried
tribute to the organisation that
or commemorated (since many
conceived, created and maintains
had been physically obliterated
them – the Commonwealth
by the destructive power of
(formerly Imperial) War Graves
industrialised warfare) near
Commission, and in particular to
where they had fallen. His second
the body’s founding father, Sir
guiding principle was uniformity
Fabian Ware, who remained at
– or equality – that in death, as
its helm until shortly before his
in the Toc H social club near
death in 1948.
Ypres, the General should rank
F o r, a s D a v i d C r a n e ’s
m e t i c u l o u s l y r e s e a r c h e d Lt P B Kehoe, Northants Regt, 11 July 1943, alongside the humblest Private.
Aged 23, Syracuse, Sicily
(Such egalitarianism led to angry
and sensitively written book
and absurd aristocratic accusations
conclusively demonstrates, without
Ware we would not remember the war and the men who that the Tory imperialist Ware was a secret socialist).
As a first step, and using his knowledge of France
sacrificed their lives in the particular ways that we do.
and
its language that few other influential Englishmen
It was Ware’s vision, allied to his driving energy, great
political skill and determination, that enabled him to possessed – Ware persuaded France, in the shape of
overcome what looked like overwhelming opposition Marshal Foch, to cede Britain the cemetery plots in
to his proposals for dealing with the war dead, and perpetuity. Next, he enlisted a team of distinguished
shaped the CWGC into the universally respected architects – headed by Edwin Lutyens no less and
including Sir Reginald Blomfield and Herbert Baker, to
institution that it remains today.
Ware, like two other early 20th century British design the cemeteries and memorials, such as Lutyen’s
In Foreign Fields
Nigel Jones
34
imposing Thiepval memorial arch, dominating the
Somme battlefield, where the names of more than
73,000 missing men are recorded on vast stone panels.
Finally, he persuaded the bard of Empire himself,
Rudyard Kipling, whose only son John was among
the missing, to give the Empires of the Dead their
literary profile. Kipling obliged with the beautiful yet
heartbreaking phrase that adorns so many headstones:
‘A soldier of the Great War. Known unto God’.
Yet even with such influential supporters on his
side, Ware faced determined opposition. Many people,
especially those who could afford the cost, wanted
to bring loved ones home from the battlefields to lie
in English churchyards or ancestral vaults. One such
who escaped Ware’s clutches was William Gladstone,
grandson of the Prime Minister, who was shipped back
to lie with his forefathers at Hawarden after being
sniped in the trenches.
Others objected to Ware’s resolute refusal to mark
graves with a Christian cross, though crosses were
incorporated on the faces of the uniform headstones,
and a large ‘Cross of sacrifice’ adorned each cemetery.
Ware argued that the cemeteries needed to look tidy and
identical, like soldiers on parade, and pointed out that
many of the dead, especially those from the Empire,
were not Christians.
He won this and every other argument and the results
of his efforts are the unbearably moving cemeteries,
originally looked after by the comrades of the dead,
that thousands will visit this and every year. So long as
memory holds, these graves are dear to us. In an age
when more and more official organisations are coming
into disrepute and derision, Britain can still be proud
of the CWGC – and Crane’s book is a fine and moving
memorial to the extraordinary man who created it.
Germany (the DDR), the teenage Leo joined crowds in
the centre of Berlin to greet President Gorbachov and
other Socialist leaders. He found the Alexanderplatz
full of people ‘waiting for things to kick off’, and so
were the police. He saw them force the crowd back and
Stasi agents drag people away. The following day he
was caught with an illegal church newspaper, arrested,
forced to stand in a stress position all night, and quickly
broke down under interrogation. A month later, on
November 9th 1989, the rampart against capitalism
fell and his life as an East German abruptly ended.
‘Forty years washed away within only a few days’, he
writes, still impressed at how quickly it all happened,
and still exploring his new identity. ‘The East clings
to me’, he says, ‘like a big family that you can’t shake
off’.
Many of us who remember the DDR are also slightly
surprised to think that the Berlin Wall and Check Point
Charlie have been consigned to history. There were
some recent reminders in the hit films, The Lives of
Others, released seventeen years after the wall came
down, and Goodbye Lenin! in 2003, about Christine,
an East German mother who has to be protected from
the news that her country had been dissolved. Leo’s
memoir of growing up in the DDR, illustrated with
grainy black and white family photos, rectifies that
fading memory. Leo takes the reader into the heart of
the DDR socialist dreamland by looking closely at the
motivations of his parents and grandparents who were
shaped by the Nazi past and the illusions that followed.
With a pleasing irony he gives an entertaining picture
of childhood in the worker’s state. In a chapter called
‘Collisions’, he describes how, aged six, he had his
‘first brush with the Stasi’, when he was knocked down
by a police car. In hospital he was kept alone for six
weeks in a room with barred windows, only seeing
his parents once a week. Later as a boy cycling in the
wood he was puzzled to find areas where the public
were kept out by high walls, and lakes where no one
was allowed to swim apart from Party officials. He and
his pals once dug a deep hole in some sand dunes. The
next day they were greeted by soldiers with Alsatian
dogs demanding to know who had dug it. After this
trauma they invented a game called, ‘Escape to the
West’, which they played with neurotic energy.
In school he was bored with rote learning the
Soviet view of history, having to memorise the three
determining factors of the revolution, ten reasons for
the superiority of socialism, and the five points of the
Party programme. ‘Listless teachers wrote the tables
on the board, listless pupils wrote them down, listless
parents signed off the class work’, he writes.
Trying to please everyone, Leo grew up a good
revolutionary, after years of citizenship lessons.
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Breakfast with the STASI
Jane Kelly
Red Love: The Story of an East German Family,
Maxim Leo, Pushkin Press, 2013, £16.99.
In Maxim Leo’s childhood in the 1970s, people
privileged enough to own a car usually drove grey
Trabants. His Communist grandfather Gerhard however
owned a brown Citroen. Little Leo was sometimes
allowed to sit in it as a treat and inadvertently gained
a whiff of the capitalist world lying a few hundred
feet away behind the Berlin Wall, or the ‘anti-fascist
protection rampart’, as he knew it.
In October 1989, the fortieth anniversary of East
35
Not easy in a state where anyone who wore jeans,
a hair quiff or slip on shoes was a class enemy. He
recalls a teacher explaining that a pop song had been
banned because the lyrics referred to Party leader Eric
Honecker wearing a leather jacket and listening to West
German radio in the lavatory.
He also vividly describes his parents’ childhood –
the feral, fatherless children of the German defeat.
His father Wolf treated bombed out Berlin as a giant
adventure playground. Children made dens in the
ruins, played football with American soldiers, found
unexploded ammunition, lit fires, smashed windows,
made fuses out of shoelaces and blew up chimneys.
German parents were too busy trying to buy flour on
the black market to notice. Wolf was cruelly beaten
by his father Werner when he returned from a POW
camp in 1947.
A poor farm boy, Werner had become a convinced
Nazi. ‘Nazism is posh communism’, he said. ‘Hitler
makes small people big’. By 1950 in the new Germany
he became a dogmatic communist. Leo’s maternal
grandfather, Gerhard, was entirely different. From a
wealthy Jewish background, he came home a hero of
the Party after fighting against the Nazis with French
partisans.
The book contains fascinating anecdotes which show
how different things used to be. Aged ten, Gerhard
managed to have a love affair with a thirty-five-year
old woman doctor he met in hospital. He spent hours
alone with her at her flat, got her to agree to marry him
if she was still single ten years on, and she remained
one of the great loves of his life.
These disparate, damaged people, desperate to
escape any responsibility for the Nazi era, met in the
marriage of Wolf and Anne, Leo’s parents. Because
of the past, the grandfathers, who built the same state
and joined the same Party, never met. Leo calls his
parent’s marriage ‘a long love and a long argument’.
Their first quarrel was about whether people trying to
escape across the border should be regarded as traitors
and punished. Anne, a journalist on a state newspaper,
was a passionate, patriotic communist, believed in a
rigidly controlled border, to keep the bad people out.
Leo’s life was made more complicated because
Wolf was an artist who favoured slip-on shoes, a
goatee beard and strange haircuts. He never crossed
the line and got into serious trouble but offended
people in petty positions of power. He yelled at his
son’s headmistress, which resulted in the author being
refused entry to extended secondary education. To take
the ‘Abitur’, and stay at school, pupils had to show
‘model behaviour’.
Apparatchik Anne declared that she would not allow
the state to ‘make a worker out of her son’. For the
36
first time she saw that the state was no good for her
children, while the author, aged 15, recognised that
the state was planning to determine his whole life and
began to think about life on the other side of the wall.
Anne’s reaction was to give up journalism and retreat
into academic life, applying for a doctorate at the
Humboldt University. As the daughter of a prominent
party member she acquired a permit to enter ‘the poison
room’, part of the library containing banned books,
mostly by Trotskyites and Euro-communists. But she
also discovered the truth about her own grandfather,
Dagobert Lubinski, a Jewish left-wing journalist, later
condemned by his fellow travellers as a ‘right-wing
traitor’.
She read how he had been excluded from the German
Communist Party in 1928 and murdered in Auschwitz
in 1943. No one had been willing to speak about him
in her family, now she discovered the truth and with it
the integrity of her own Jewish identity. She could not
shake off this new knowledge. As Leo puts it: ‘It was
proof that someone could be right, and on the other
side.’ With Dagobert as her hero she began to sense
that she could end her dependence on the Party and
think for herself.
Maxim Leo, in the tradition of his family, is a
great journalist, and he details the struggles and
compromises of his family with great subtlety and
humour. My only criticism of this lively, illuminating
work is the attempt to make it even more vivid by the
use of the present tense, a fad that is unnecessary and
annoys many readers.
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A Musical Parson
John Jolliffe
Music at Midnight. The Life and Poetry of George
Herbert, John Drury, Allen Lane, 2013, £25.
The title of this book is explained by the following
story. George Herbert is said to have arrived at a
‘private Musick meeting’ in Salisbury Cathedral with
his clothes in a muddy and thoroughly uncharacteristic
state. When criticised for this he related that he had
met a poor man on the road with a horse that had
collapsed under its load. Herbert had been an excellent
Samaritan, and helped the owner of the horse to get
things straight, at some cost to his usual presentable
appearance. It was then objected that ‘so dirty an
employment’ ill became a member of his family, only
a mile or two from their home at Wilton. He is said to
have answered that ‘the thought of what he had done
would prove Musick to him at Midnight’. It is possible
that the story is one of several inventions composed for
him by his early biographer and admirer Izaak Walton.
Nevertheless the cap fits well enough.
Much of George Herbert’s early life was devoted to a
worldly ambition which earned him the post of Public
Orator at Cambridge, a possible stepping-stone to an
important position at court. But he moved away from
all that, to take Holy Orders, though worrying about
his unfitness, and felt that:
necessary, rather than preferable, to hold Christian
beliefs to appreciate his poetry. Coleridge, who was
a great admirer, said that only a Christian could fully
understand Herbert. The crucial word is ‘fully’. Drury
generously claims that ‘the reader only needs some
experience of love’s happiness, storms and conflicts …
to engage with such poetry.’ The analogy is incomplete,
but perhaps reading Herbert without sharing his beliefs
is like reading a great Latin or French literary master
only in translation, and enjoying it without fully getting
the point.
Ultimately, it is the significance of the material that
matters. Maurice Bowra’s favourite term of approval in
literature was ‘big stuff’, such as the works of Homer
and Aeschylus. George Herbert’s ‘stuff’ is bigger and
more profound than that of any of Bowra’s heroes. And
Drury has such a strong rapport with Herbert that in
this book it sometimes seems that it is not Drury that
is speaking but Herbert himself.
Finally, a special word of praise for Allen Lane’s
production of the book: good paper, generous spacing,
well chosen illustrations and endpapers, all at a
generous price. Why cannot other publishers (other
than the glorious Yale University Press) do the same?
Only, since God doth often make
Of lowly matter for high uses meet,
I throw me at his feet.
It is the sheer freshness and originality of his ideas
that is so compelling, and, for me at least, the idiom
of the early seventeenth century, more arresting and
exciting than the more suave and mellifluous style of
the Augustans , Pope, and later, Gibbon and Horace
Walpole in the following century
He moved on to the peaceful parish of Bemerton, half
way between the palatial seat of his distant relations,
the Pembroke Herberts at Wilton, and the glories of
Salisbury Cathedral. The deep obscurity of some of
his poetic imagery means that readers will often need
a guide to light them through the darkness. Drury is
the perfect guide, interweaving the details of Herbert’s
life and its context with the poems, and observing the
interplay between the two. Drury writes with great
charm as well as great seriousness, and succeeds in
making what would otherwise be deeply difficult not
only intelligible but wonderfully easy to appreciate. He
is at first a little severe on Herbert’s early, immature
priggishness, his ‘aloofness and self-conscious dresssense, a type hard to know and hard to like.’ From his
earlier days as Dean of King’s College, Cambridge ,
and later of Christ Church, perhaps he speaks from
experience.
Although Herbert was only thirty-nine, it was a great
mercy for him to die in 1633 and to be spared the
traumas and tragedies of the Civil War, though who
knows but he might have been inspired to compose
admirable poems about the conflicting causes and
the sacrifices that they entailed. We know from
Isaak Walton that music was extremely important to
Herbert, both in the choral performances in Salisbury
Cathedral and at ‘private music-meetings’, and he
was a competent performer himself. In an early poem
‘Church Music’, probably written in his Cambridge
days, he said ‘But if I travel in your company, you
know the way to Heaven’s door.’
Who reads Herbert today? Drury points out that ‘the
primacy of love over theology and everything else
is a major reason for the hold Herbert’s poetry has
on modern readers, secular and even atheist though
they may be’. The question remains whether it is
back to contents
Swan Song
Celia Haddon
Birds & People, Mark Cocker, photographs by David
Tipling, Jonathan Cape, 2013, £40.
Winged like angels and two-legged like humans, birds
have inspired religious worship, poetry, folklore and
scores of great TV nature programmes. Yet we kill them
for food, feathers, game ‘preservation’, and sometimes
just for fun. This beautifully illustrated book,
encyclopaedic in its scope, covers every bird family in
the world and traces each family’s relationship with us.
For humans are both persecutors and saviours of
these dinosaur descendants. Millions of birds live
in factory farm misery so we can eat their cheap
eggs or their meat. A fashion for feathers on hats in
Victorian times nearly exterminated several species and
millions of birds lose their habitat every year to urban
development, logging or agricultural improvements.
Yet at the same time the USA is spending a fortune to
rescue the California condor by captive rearing. Here in
the UK we are currently trying to re-introduce the Great
Bustard to the Salisbury plains. And in Bermuda one
single-minded resident, David Wingate, has devoted
his life to restoring the Cahow, the Bermuda petrel
thought extinct by1621. From eighteen pairs found on
37
a tiny islet in 1951 he has protected and encouraged the
species so that there are now about 100 pairs.
Humans love some birds and hate others. Gamekeepers
loathe the hen harriers and peregrines that prey on red
grouse. Garden bird lovers hate the magpies that eat the
little chicks of songbirds. Fishermen in the UK want
a cull of cormorants calling them ‘the black death’.
In the Far East, however, the same birds, cormorants,
are domesticated and admired. They are leashed by
fishermen and land their catch in the boat when a ring
on their necks prevents them swallowing the fish. In
haiku, those poems of seventeen syllables, ‘cormorant’
is a word denoting summer. Even in England
the hunting-mad monarch,
James I, tried to domesticate
them, installing a Master of
Cormorants on the Thames
and a population of cormorants
in St James’s park.
Christmas cards, ad
campaigns and nature films
confirm that we love robins,
p-p-p-penguins, peacocks
(though we think they are
vain), swans (once believed
to sing as they died), toucans
(a logo for Guinness), owls
(though we are superstitious
about their daytime cries), nightingales and larks.
Human attitudes are as diverse as the appearance and
behaviour of the birds themselves.
There are birds that walk on the water, fluttering their
wings to stall while their webbed feet touch the surface.
These storm petrels weigh less than two ounces but
criss-cross oceans only coming to land under cover of
darkness to crawl into burrows where they nest. Frigate
birds are also long distance travellers. One frigate bird,
fitted with a satellite transmitter, flew 2,500 miles
nonstop over 26 days, sleeping on the wing as it went.
Another aerial acrobat, the swift builds its nest from
detritus snatched from the air, then stuck to a cave
or house wall with its own saliva. The spit of some
species is so highly valued it is made into birds’ nest
soup. The weaver bird, as its name suggests, weaves
dried grass into a pot shape dangling from a twig. Each
avian species designs and builds a characteristic nest
presumably following a pattern hard-wired in its brain.
The hamerkop in Africa takes six weeks to run up
a gigantic nest made up of anything from discarded
rags, old bones, and desiccated frogs to cowpats and
even human faeces. One nest consisted of 200lbs of
grass and sticks, and included a broken cassette tape,
a glove, a plastic dish and a plastic cup, two peacock
feathers, two socks, 45 rags, a human comb, a pair of
38
men’s underpants, 10 plastic bags, some bits of hose
pipe, and six bicycle tyres.
Birds also have elaborate sex and love lives. The
bowerbird attracts a mate by building an intricate love
pagoda of woven grasses decorated with bright objects
such as feathers, bright pebbles, marbles, bits of glass
and even sweet wrappers. While most birds pair for just
one season, bald eagles and swans, despite the story of
Leda, are monogamous and mate for life.
Much has been made of the way warm-blooded
mammals raise their young with parental care. Most
birds do the same, wearing themselves out to raise
their offspring. Only the cuckoo avoids all effort by
leaving its egg in the nest of
another species. The cuckoo
chick then ejects any other
chicks using a special hollow in
its back to heave them out. This
behaviour seemed so unlikely
that in l788 Sir Joseph Banks
refused to believe it when
Edward Jenner submitted the
first proven record.
The bright plumage of
parrots has meant that millions
have been kept in the solitary
confinement of small boring
cages despite their evident
intelligence. In the Middle Ages they became a symbol
of freedom from sin, a pet for popes, and appeared
in paintings of the Virgin Mary. This led to parrots
being named Mary, and from Mary to the name’s
nickname Polly. There is the treasure trove of this kind
of information in this book.
In modern times the use of the painkiller diclofenac
(sold as Voltarol in the UK) as a veterinary drug has
nearly wiped out 40m Indian vultures. The crash in
numbers has caused problems for the Parsees who
relied on vultures to devour the flesh off the corpses
of their dead in so called ‘sky burials.’ The vultures’
digestive system could deal with the cholera, typhoid
and smallpox bugs found in corpses but their kidneys
could not withstand the diclofenac. Now Parsee bodies
have to be eaten more slowly by kites and crows.
Most of the time humans kill birds, but some birds
have killed humans. Pelicans, white storks and other
large migrating birds have collided 6,000 times with
Israeli aircraft and completely destroyed nine fighter
planes, killed three pilots, inflicted as much as six
million pounds worth of damage. Their destructive
power was greater than any enemy action! Eventually
the birds’ migration routes were mapped and a radar
early warning system established reducing collisions
by about three quarters.
Modern human society has been good for some bird
populations, like the red kites that thrive on road-kill
along the M40 or the black kites in India who live off
the rubbish dumps of Delhi. Swifts and swallows find
our buildings ideal for their nests, while blue tits and
other garden birds have nest boxes installed especially
for them.
Birds and People is a delight to read, full of curious
information, and with some splendid photographs.
The author has been collecting personal stories and
information since l997, and it is this density and
diversity of voices that makes for such a good read.
It can be dipped into like an encyclopaedia but once
started, the temptation is to continue reading, like the
flying of a frigate bird, for hour after hour.
to explain what it is and how it came about.
His command of the history of psychiatry is
impressive, indeed is probably without peer, but he
is not an elegant writer. The very detail sometimes
obscures the main point he is trying to make and the
reader feels himself in the midst of a labyrinth without a
lucid guide to help him escape. But Shorter is a scholar
and certainly not the kind of crude polemicist who
would conclude that there is no place for psychiatry
in the world.
The classification of psychiatric disorders is
inherently difficult because there are no objective
tests for them except where they are produced by
concomitant physical disease. While some disturbances
of perception and behaviour appear to be genuine
diseases, others appear more like exaggerated
responses to circumstances. For reasons internal to
the history of psychiatry, the diagnosis of melancholia
which was categorical (either the patient had it or he
didn’t) was abandoned in favour of depression which
was dimensional (the patient could have much or a
little of it). The reasons for this abandonment had
little to do with science and much to do with power
struggles within the psychiatric establishment, but it
occurred just before the drug companies launched a
new category of supposedly antidepressant drugs, the
selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the SSRIs.
Though these drugs were of very doubtful efficacy, the
companies that made them, assisted by complaisant
doctors, managed to insinuate into the public’s mind
that unhappiness and discontent were not normal
experiences but matters of disordered serotonin
metabolism, correctable by pills. From the commercial
if not the therapeutic point of view, SSRIs became
the most successful drugs ever marketed, the triumph
of superstition dressed up as neuroscience. Professor
Shorter tells this story well.
He has his own axe to grind, however. He believes
that, because of the mistaken way in which doctors have
classified mental disorders they have been barking up
the wrong neurones and the wrong neurotransmitters.
He holds out the hope that, if only they could address
themselves to the real neuronal source of all our
discontents they could eventually discover an answer
to them. This, it seems to me, would be to make exactly
the same mistake all over again.
It is strange, then, to find in the history of Broadmoor,
the Victorian institution for the criminally insane,
the common sense so singularly lacking in modern
psychiatry. The author, Broadmoor’s archivist, is a very
pleasant companion to the history of an institution that
has so powerfully entered our nation’s consciousness.
He has no grand theory to propound and his book
is all the better for it. He tells the story of some of
back to contents
Barking up the Wrong
Neurones
Anthony Daniels
How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and
Fall of the Nervous Breakdown, Edward Shorter,
Oxford University Press, 2013, £19.99.
Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the
Lunatic Asylum, Mark Stevens, Pen and Sword,
2013, £19.99.
When I started out as a doctor, forty years ago,
depression – meaning melancholia – was a rare and
serious disease. Patients would be admitted to hospital
and observed for two weeks without treatment to
ensure that their symptoms were neither fleeting nor
exaggerated. They would then be treated with drugs
that really worked, occasionally only too well, for they
would become the opposite of melancholic: expansive,
euphoric, grandiose, overactive and often destructive.
Sometimes we would have to intercept their letters to
forestall disaster. Anyone who has seen a melancholic
in full despair or a manic in full flight is bound to
conclude that he is in the presence of true illness.
Since then, of course, depression has become so
frequent, or at least so frequently diagnosed, that it is in
effect the common cold of the mind. More than ten per
cent of the adult population of western countries now
takes antidepressants or drugs that are supposed to be
antidepressants (in fact, they don’t work very well in
most cases, though they have side-effects). Does this
mean that we are in the midst of a terrible epidemic
of misery, or is something else happening? Edward
Shorter, a renowned Canadian medical historian,
believes that the latter is the case, and in his book tries
39
Broadmoor’s more celebrated inmates, for example
that of Richard Dadd, the celebrated painter who killed
his father (I resisted the temptation to make a bad
pun) but went on to paint some strange masterpieces,
some of them in the Tate Gallery. The author also tells,
often movingly, the story of the ‘ordinary’ inmates, if
ordinary is a word that can properly be used of such a
population. We learn of escapees and women patients
who gave birth while detained, and also of the medical
superintendents who suffered attacks, some of them
serious, by patients.
Inevitably the stories told in so short a book are
selected, but because the author has no grand theory
he wants to propound one trusts him not to have
selected them surreptitiously on grounds that he does
not want openly to acknowledge. This is not to say
that no general point emerges, and it is a point that
surprised me greatly: namely that this asylum which
could so easily have been a chamber of horrors was run,
imperfectly as it might have been, with humanity and
in a generally enlightened way. From the photographs
in the book, it was certainly aesthetically superior to
anything we have built for decades. I am far from
convinced that we have altogether improved on the
Victorians in humanity, and I think that if they were
to judge present day psychiatric practice in Britain
they would find much of it bizarre, irrational and even
gratuitously cruel. For example, a patient today might,
in the course of a single episode of illness, be treated
by as many as four or five different psychiatric teams;
this would strike the Victorians as the epitome of
callousness. They would also comment adversely on
the time-serving nature of the psychiatric establishment
that did not protest against this assault on common
sense and common decency. Stevens’ book is modest
in scope but is a model of its kind. It plunges the
reader imaginatively into the world of the past, and
one can ask no more than that. A further book by him
is announced and I look forward to it eagerly.
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Sociology without Tears
Christie Davies
The Education of David Martin: the making of an
unlikely sociologist, David Martin, London, SPCK,
2013, £25.
David Martin is a most unlikely sociologist but he
is also a great one, a man who has made a profound
and creative contribution to our understanding of
the sociology of religion, the very core of sociology.
Economic life is better studied by economists,
40
education by psychologists and social mobility by
statisticians but the interaction of religion, morality
and politics, David Martin’s area of expertise, is the
true province of the sociologist. The practical value
of his insights and knowledge may be well seen in his
campaign to retain the use of the King James Bible
and the Book of Common Prayer within the Church
of England.
David Martin is certainly unusual among sociologists,
for he is a committed Christian in a profession
dominated by Godless scoffers and mockers and
infected by devotees of the absurd, secular pseudoreligions founded by Marx, Freud and Foucault. He
is unusual in being a man steeped in high culture
in a profession known for its philistines as well as
its Philistines. Finally Martin is that rare Professor
of Sociology who understands the value of loyalty,
tradition and continuity in a profession known for
its mindless radicalism. One great value of this
autobiographical account is that it provides us with
insights into where his distinctive achievements come
from as well as into the man himself.
David Martin FBA’s remarkable erudition is even
more striking given his erratic education before he
entered the LSE at the late age of thirty. A middling sort
of school education from which he failed to get into
King’s College London, national service in the NonCombatant Corps and a sentence in a teacher training
college was followed by several years of teaching in a
primary school, while receiving indifferent tuition for
a London external degree on the side. Yet well before
he went to university he already had the knowledge of
poetry and philosophy and the skill as a musician that
later made him a defender of the virtues of the Book
of Common Prayer against the banal alternative on
offer. However, by the time of this latter-day prayerbook controversy he had mastered from Durkheim
to Douglas the sociological and anthropological
analyses of the complex relationship between religion
and language. He understood what was at stake with
much greater depth and clarity than the bureaucratic
prelates who opposed him. His later as well as his
earlier publications on the nature of religious language
prove this. What of any merit have those colourless
suffragans ever written? They have left neither roots
nor branches.
When at school, David Martin became a pacifist in
the Tolstoy tradition; pacifism was a mutation of his
experience of growing up in a fervently evangelical
home. He sought to be a conscientious objector to
National Service and ended up in the Non-Combatant
Corps, along with a wide variety of Protestant sectarians
which first stimulated his interest in the sociology of
religion. This was an unpleasant period for him in
essence of his long journey from the disillusionment
of hearing Frank Cousins haranguing a CND rally in
Trafalgar Square to his decision to seek ordination in
the Church of England.
This does not mean that he abandoned his regard
for the peaceable core of Christianity, whose nonviolent manifesto, the New Testament, stands against
the honour codes that have dominated human history
and which greatly disfigure its main rival religion. It
was this high regard for the Christian essence that in
1997 led him to write Does Christianity Cause War? a
refutation of the accusations being made by the militant
atheists of the time. The atheists had conveniently
forgotten the careers of their co-religionists Lenin,
Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Castro.
At the LSE David Martin was repeatedly confronted
with the upholders of that ‘infantile disorder’, left
wing sociology. One of its manifestations was a
fanatical belief in secularization, in the inevitable
withering away of religion with the advance of secular
ideologies which had progressive material forces on
their side: the ‘here come science and industry, bang
goes religion’ brigade. Today, one wonders how
these refuted prophets have coped with the collapse
of Soviet socialism and the return of the Russian
Orthodox Church or the rise of militant Islam. Yet they
always seem to have holes to wriggle through, like the
Bulgarian Marxist sociologist whom Professor Martin
met in the 1960s who explained away the strength
of Roman Catholicism in Poland by claiming that
Poland had been ‘artificially held back’. No doubt in
the same way that Methodism had ‘artificially’ staved
off proletarian revolution in Britain.
From his scholarly visits to many parts of Europe
and beyond and his detailed knowledge of these
countries’ histories and social structures emerged the
magnum opus for which David Martin became famous,
A General Theory of Secularization, 1978. This book
is one of the great studies in comparative sociology.
In it he demonstrates why sometimes secularization
happens and sometimes the reverse and why each of
these processes takes on such varied forms. That great
vision of the progressive atheists, a single, simple linear
process of secularization, is a delusion.
Martin also became the great chronicler of the rise of
Protestantism in Latin America in recent decades. The
ordinary people of that continent found their revolution
not in liberation theology but in Pentecostalism, a
form of religion relevant to the modernization of their
lives. Martin understood what had happened and what
was happening in part because it took him back to
his own roots. Alone of the visiting anthropologists,
he could enter the life of the worshippers at a tiny
chapel in Chile, share their bible-based religion and
which he suffered the brutal absurdity of the army
life of a conscript in peacetime, without experiencing
any of the comradeship and sense of purpose that give
it meaning for others. In his autobiography he writes
about uninspiring contact with the pioneer corps and
the military police in an amusing way, reminding
the reviewer of a talk that he wrote for BBC radio,
which everyone who read it enjoyed but which could
not be broadcast because of its necessary obscene
language. But it lives again here. The talk was, and
his autobiographical account is, funnier than rival
accounts of peacetime national service, like David
Lodge’s Ginger You’re Barmy.
After several years as a primary school teacher,
where at one school he subversively taught the
children to whisper their multiplication tables
because the progressive headmaster had forbidden
this way of learning, he gained a post-graduate
scholarship at the LSE. It was natural that he
should now choose to study, as his PhD topic,
pacifism in British politics in the inter-war period.
He became aware that the strong ethical strand in
left-wing politics at this time may well have made
World War II more likely to happen, for it followed
that the pacifists must share part of the blame for
that malign time in European history. Martin’s
book Pacifism: An Historical and Sociological
Study induced fury in those old pacifists still
alive and in their lineal descendants of the 1960s;
unreasonably violent emotions come easily to the
espousers of peace and reason. His autobiography
shows too how the combining of Max Weber’s
sociology with a detailed knowledge of English
history led him to change his own philosophical
and religious position. He writes:
More profoundly, I no longer felt the force of the
analogy between the free self-offering of Christ and
a refusal to resist the evil of force and the force of
evil. The action of the Redeemer... is not a formula
for deciding what we personally should do or what
governments should do. In such dilemmas we are
not deciding only for ourselves but have to take into
account all the third parties likely to bear the brunt
of our action or our failure to act..... Governments
have to calculate the uncertain and long-term effects
of their decisions, including pre-emptive strikes when
the moral balance is dubious, rather than waiting till
the moral balance is unequivocal and the encounter
more likely to be very bloody and to favour the enemy.
David Martin was moving, in his own words, to
‘the realistic approach accepted by the Magisterial
Reformation looking back to Augustine’. This was the
41
tell them stories of the lives and faith of his father and
grandfather that matched their own experiences. He
had come home.
Yet his creative understanding is that of one who is
not at home but has consistently stood outside the very
institutions to which he has belonged. He has been
in turn a pacifist in the army, a believer in education
in a British state school, a sceptic among militant
secularists and an upholder of traditional texts in a
Church of England racing after pseudo-modernity. You
don’t need to be an Anglican to enjoy the journeys of
David Martin any more than you need to be a Roman
Catholic to identify with the Newman of Apologia
Pro Vita Sua. But Martin has a greater capacity
for humour than Newman did. The sections of his
autobiography about the army, his visit to communist
Bulgaria, the bizarre 1960s conferences organized by
secular theologians and university life in Texas made
me laugh out loud.
This is inspiring account of the life of one who
has walked with royalty and politicians as well as
gifted peasants, professors and priests. It is written
with insight and candour and, where appropriate,
amusement.
back to contents
A Passion for Reason
Michael St John Parker
The Enlightenment, and why it still matters,
Anthony Pagden, Oxford University Press, 2013, £20.
What should we think about the European Enlightenment
of the eighteenth century? The Oxford English
Dictionary as it was published from the 1930s to the
1960s was in no doubt about the matter: ‘Shallow and
pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for
authority and tradition, etc applied esp to the spirit and
aims of the French philosophers of the 18th c.’
The Dictionary’s verdict will have been coloured
by the Romantic and post-Romantic rejection of
everything that the eighteenth century was then
thought to stand for – a barren classicism in the arts, a
coldly heartless social order, a pompous formality of
manners, a deathly dreariness of spirit, as portrayed in
Browning’s A Toccata of Galuppi’s. By this account,
the Enlightenment was no better than a broken
marionette of the commedia dell’arte.
For some mid-century thinkers however, such as
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, the Aufklärung
seemed to be not a marionette but a monster, spreading
unrestrained brutality far and wide as it pursued its
42
inhuman logic to the ultimate, frightful conclusions
advocated, and practised, by Hitler and Stalin.
This dark view lost its power as the horrors of the war
years subsided, despite the attempts of Eric Hobsbawm
and others to keep it in vogue. In the English version of
a Europe-wide change of mind, aesthetes such as James
Lees-Milne and sophisticates such as Harold Nicolson
(The Age of Reason, Constable, 1960), re-asserted the
glories of classical art, architecture and literature ; an
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment was set up to
celebrate the music of the period; serious historians
such as Jack Plumb re-evaluated the achievements
of eighteenth-century government ; and philosophers
such as Michael Oakeshott reinstated the rational
tradition in their thinking. At the turn of the century,
Roy Porter’s majestic study Enlightenment – Britain
and the Creation of the Modern World (Allen Lane,
2000) proclaimed something like a new orthodoxy of
approval.
The trouble with orthodoxies, however, is that
they can become self-regarding, and prone to overstatement. So now we have Prof Anthony Pagden,
of the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard,
Johns Hopkins and California/Los Angeles, publishing
a book in which he asserts that the Enlightenment
brought about a conclusive and irreversible change in
the mindset of the human race, an end to the fraudulent
and frequently cruel power of religion, especially in the
form of Roman Catholicism, and the triumph of rational
tolerance and liberal attitudes, cosmopolitanism and
internationalism. As a final flourish, he intimates the
likely imminence of a system of world government,
by way of the benignly idealist field experiment of the
European Union.
It really is a pity that Pagden feels obliged to make
such a display of other-worldliness in his account of
the Enlightenment achievement, because it must cast
doubt on the credibility of other parts of his story.
Yet his knowledge of the intelligentsia of eighteenthcentury Europe is encyclopaedic, his exposition of their
systems of thought is lucid and skilful, and he writes
in a manner that would have commended him to his
subjects as a man of sensibility, fully in touch with their
own modes of thought and expression.
Uneasy with Rousseau, Pagden is most happily
at home with Hume (‘the single most influential
proponent of secular ethics … the Enlightenment
ever produced’). For him, Locke and Vico are the
Prophets, and Kant is the Messiah of the ‘project’ (his
own word). The contributions made to this project by
all the obvious figures, from Pufendorf onwards, are
explained with unhurried clarity, at note-taking speed;
some interesting individuals of lesser fame – Feijoo,
Wolff, Francoise de Graffigny, for example – are
given moments in the limelight. The characteristic
contributions of England and Scotland are agreeably
distinguished from those of France, Italy and Germany.
The ‘science of man’ and the cult of the ‘noble savage’
are elegantly expounded, and suitably underpinned by
such essential concepts as ‘sympathy’ and ‘sociability’.
In short, we are admirably instructed.
There is a recognisable flavour of the lecture-theatre
about the book. We frequently receive advertisements
about treats in store (‘Montesquieu – to whom we
shall come shortly’), and flashbacks to remind us
of last week’s work; there are little flicks of current
material (mostly American) to rouse the somnolent,
and occasional moments of mordancy to amuse the
admirers (Pope Benedict XVI comes in for some very
rough handling).
For someone who is at least a part-historian, Pagden
allows himself some surprisingly superficial detailing ;
his account of the Jacobite rising of 1745, for example,
is almost hilariously inept, and there is a painful lack
of objectivity in his remarks about the Neapolitan
revolution of 1799. One fears that he is playing to a
Californian undergraduate audience in passages such
as these.
The relative lack of sharp historical perspective
is probably what makes it easy for Pagden to forget
the difference between a lecturer’s podium and a
propagandist’s soap-box, as he draws to his conclusion.
He is troubled by the apparently inexplicable barbarities
of the French Revolution, and manifestly prefers the
milder rationality of the United States. He effectively
ignores the Sturm und Drang, the irrational emotions,
the blood-spattered nationalism of nineteenth-century
Romanticism. And he simply denies the enduring and
frequently destructive power of religion throughout
the last two centuries.
As I write, Parliament is tying itself into procedural
knots over a Government proposal to strip foreignborn terrorists of their British citizenship; a Henley
town councillor, a devout Baptist, who has publicly
surmised that the disastrous January floods may be
God’s revenge for the legitimation of homosexual
marriage, has been expelled from his political party
(UKIP) and faces furious demands to resign for
offending the gay lobby; a Lib Dem MP of Muslim
faith has been assailed by death threats for saying on
television that he is not affronted by a portrayal of the
Prophet Mohammed on a t-shirt.
These are a few of the least significant items featured
in English domestic news at the end of January, 2014.
They are perhaps no more than trifles – certainly, when
measured against the horrors that afflict the cradle of
world civilisation in the Middle East, or anywhere
else you may care to look. But they are telling enough
to make one doubt the final message of Pagden’s
neo-Panglossian guidebook to the philosophy of the
Enlightenment.
(Envoi: has Oxford University Press ever published
a volume containing more misprints than this one?
Someone should have their knuckles rapped, sharply,
for sheer slovenliness.)
back to contents
Killing Big Pharma
Richard Packer
The Drugs Don’t Work: A Global Threat, Dame
Sally Davies, Jonathan Grant & Mike Catchpole,
Penguin, 2013, £3.99.
This book by the Chief Medical Officer for England
and her academic collaborators shows a real threat to
public health. Antibiotics are becoming progressively
less effective so that the number of people dying from
infectious diseases is now starting to increase. This
development is in marked contrast to the previous sixty
years when the numbers fell largely because of the
discovery of antibiotics. On current trends the increase
in longevity that has occurred in recent centuries and
accelerated recently will stop before long and even go
into sharp reverse.
Some of the relevant facts are half-appreciated by
the public but some are not; overall the situation is
sufficiently serious to warrant the attention of lay
persons and not just health specialists.
The facts are clearly set out in this short book, but
some of them are complicated and non-scientists will
have to concentrate if they are fully to take on board
every point made.
Penicillin, the original antibiotic, was first used
clinically in the 1940s. In the following four decades
numerous other classes of antibiotics were discovered
and deployed. They transformed the treatment of
infectious diseases and improved life chances,
effectively eliminating the threat from numerous
infections, especially in the West, but also elsewhere.
It is estimated average life expectancy has increased
by twenty years as a result.
But unfortunately no new class of antibiotics has been
discovered for some thirty years, nor are any believed
to be in the pipeline. Further, resistance to antibiotics
among the pathogens they target is increasing steadily.
The situation is patchy but for some diseases like
tuberculosis, what amounts to drug-resistant strains are
already well established in parts of the world.
We face three major problems. The first is the marked
slowing of the discovery of classes of antibiotics.
43
The second is the misuse of antibiotics because of
overuse – in some countries they can be bought over
the counter – or from improper use – people not
finishing courses of treatment which leads to pathogens
surviving with increased risk of their mutating into
resistant forms; and thirdly from widespread overuse
in animal husbandry.
The third problem is the most important one. Even
without misuse pathogens will develop resistance to
antibiotics. As Darwin showed, given time, organisms
change in reaction to the environment so that they
have a better chance of survival and reproduction. If
the environment contains antibiotics then the relevant
organisms will, slowly, learn to live with them. (In
the same way humans learn, slowly, to live with
pathogens. That is why in the 1500s many thousands
of native Americans died from measles and mumps
when deaths from these causes were unusual among
European populations. The Europeans had over
centuries developed some immunity to the diseases
while the native Americans, to whom they were new,
had had no chance to do so.)
Even without the misuse of antibiotics we therefore
have a problem stemming from the lack of new
discoveries and the advance of resistance in pathogens.
Misuse, however, means the problem will arrive much
more quickly than it would otherwise.
Hence there are only two ways forward: to reduce the
misuse of antibiotics and to encourage new discoveries.
Unfortunately both require international agreements
which present major challenges. Something can be
achieved by reducing misuse at the national level, but
given the extent of international movements of people,
nothing like enough. The prospects for an effective
global agreement specifying what is needed, banning
the use of antibiotics as growth promoters in animals,
requiring medical supervision for human use, appears
slight. Even in Europe the need for such a policy is
far from recognised, while attitudes in some poorer
countries are positively hostile on the well-worn basis
that you (the West) have used these things for fifty years
and we want fifty years’ use as well.
The authors put forward a number of ideas about new
discoveries, such as large prizes for success, which
might have some value. But the real need is to make
it worthwhile for the big international pharmaceutical
companies to invest the billions needed. In other words
they need bigger profits and by far the easiest way of
providing those would be to increase the length of
patent protection. Even the companies are not arguing
this case publicly, probably for fear of the criticisms
they would be likely to receive.
This book explains a major problem which faces
us all. It needs publicity at a global level which it is
44
not getting. One reason for that is that much of what
is required, broadly making it more difficult for poor
people to obtain medicines and increasing the profits of
large multinational corporations, is difficult to present
attractively, so nobody makes the effort. But sooner or
later, preferably sooner, somebody must set about the
task or many of us will be dying younger than nature
requires. That ought to be sufficient stimulus for action.
back to contents
‘I had them all shot’
Merrie Cave
Life and Death of the Spanish Republic, Henry
Buckley, IB Tauris, 2014, £12.99.
A 19th century Spanish General was asked on his
deathbed whether he would forgive his enemies: ‘My
enemies? I have none, I had them all shot’. Henry
Buckley’s account of the Spanish Civil War, originally
published in 1940, (the entire edition was lost in the
Blitz and has only just been reprinted) describes the
violence and backwardness of a country frequently
on the verge of civil war. Since the Renaissance
Spanish conflicts have also been part of European
conflagrations in which foreign political ideas were
received with enthusiasm by one group of Spaniards
and opposed ferociously by another. With its arbitrary
savagery, odd skirmishes and sieges on hill tops with
antiquated weapons, the Spanish Civil War looked
back to the Middle Ages. It also anticipated the Second
World War with both sides inviting the assistance of
foreign powers some of whom extensively bombed the
civilian population.
Henry Buckley was the correspondent of the Daily
Telegraph in Spain and his book is one of the best I
have read on the subject, along with Brenan’s Spanish
Labyrinth and Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. It is not
a logical historical record – there are many omissions
and a deficient arrangement of material, but it is a
colourful eyewitness account and an exciting read. You
feel you are there among the violence and suffering:
‘On reaching the top (of the underground station) near
the entrance lay a man without a head. It had been
cut off as cleanly as if with a razor. Just beyond lay,
very still, a girl, her silken-clad legs twisted queerly.’
Buckley comes over as an attractive personality with a
deep compassion for the Spanish people whom he lets
speak for themselves rather than pushing his own ideas.
Unlike many of the newspapermen who dropped
into Spain in 1936, Buckley had lived there since
1929 and had a thorough understanding of Spain’s
long-term problems: ABC (Army, Bishops, King).
He had no illusions about them. The army, overloaded
with officers, had a long tradition of interfering in
politics but their failure to hold on to Morocco had
damaged their reputation. At the behest of the King,
Primo de Riviera became the military dictator in 1923.
He fulfilled the wish of every Spanish general to
save Spain but his attempts to modernise bankrupted
the country. The monarchy, along with a fictitious
parliament, had always been unpopular and Alfonso
XIII fled the country soon after Riviera in 1931.
Buckley was a fervent Catholic and a natural
conservative, but shocked at what he found in Spain.
‘Much as I disliked the mob violence and the burning of
churches I felt that the people in Spain who professed
most loudly their Catholic faith were the most to blame
for the existence of illiterate masses and a threadbare
national economy.’ Religion was used as an excuse for
the continuation of social injustice. His descriptions of
the suffering of ordinary people are among his best:
Spanish villages are as ‘picturesque as any in the
world, the houses look much as they must have done
two centuries ago, but they are not nice places to live
in’. Living on gruel and bread, their wooden ploughs
‘would have been considered modern in the days of
Julius Caesar. Absentee landlords built houses instead
of growing wheat but some of them were nearly as
poor as their tenants and couldn’t afford the train fare
to Madrid. That city consumed most of the national
budget with an army of useless civil servants – a
school lavatory seat could not be installed without a
commission coming to and from Madrid. But Buckley
found living there more comfortable than Paris or
London, with cheap central heating, good meals and
refrigerators.
Buckley supported the Republic but realized quickly
that their leaders could not conquer the country’s
gigantic problems for they were well meaning middle
class lawyers more suited to governing France or
England. A divided Left wanted social revolution while
those on the Right accepted the Republic but really
despised it and were waiting for ‘the man on horseback’
to overthrow it. As Prime Minister, Azana had achieved
great popularity by curbing the army and granting
autonomy to Catalonia and the Basque provinces, but
he failed to break up the latifundia (the big estates in
the south and south-west). Buckley describes a big
meeting in 1935, to which some people had travelled
six hundred miles: Azana’s address ‘would have been
more suitable for a Rotary Club luncheon’. He was
terrified of the crowd because what they wanted to hear
he could not deliver: that the Spanish Republic would
act and not just talk. The country needed a great leader
with inspiring oratory who could exploit that peculiar
spiritual quality of the Spanish people.
Buckley gives incisive sketches of other actors
in the Spanish drama: La Pasionaria was the only
Spanish politician who impressed him ‘as being a great
person… and with more character in her little finger
than Azana in his whole body’ – not that he agreed with
what she said. There was nothing revolutionary about
Largo Caballero; he was just a good stolid trade union
leader with a great dislike of Bolshevism and afraid
that Spain would fall under Moscow’s yoke. Buckley
did not think the Russians could have achieved that at
such a long distance. He found Juan Negrin the most
interesting figure of the war, who stayed in power
because of his un-Spanish talent for organization.
Unlike others Buckley admired the International
Brigades; even the ‘good for nothings’ all fought as
heroes. The Germans were the best because many of
them had been in concentration camps and death to
them was not as horrible.
By 1938 and the Munich agreement, realists, like
Buckley, knew that Franco would win. The Republic
had never received the support to which it was entitled
under international law for France and Britain thought
such a policy would lead to a general war for which
they were unprepared; this inaction suited the appeasers
anyway. The tragic end to the eight year old Republic
was the one story Buckley wished he had never had
to cover: his description of the retreat into France is
heartrending: … ‘thousands of people whose life was
in danger, not because they had murdered anyone or
robbed a single thing in their lives but just because
they had fought for the progress and independence of
their land, were left to face at the worst a firing squad
and at the best a concentration camp.’
Unlike many contemporaries Buckley realised it was
as wrong to label the 1936 revolt fascist as to describe
the Republic as communist. The Falange was a very
small party then and its leader José de Rivera was in
gaol. The Army always remained in control and when
a Falange leader, Hedilla, objected to Franco’s policy
he was tried and exiled. Buckley did not believe that
Franco would be able to build a Fascist regime any more
than the Republic was able to impose a democracy on a
semi-feudal base. I wonder what Buckley thought later
when this Army dictator saw Hitler off and ensured
Britain’s safety in the Mediterranean, and whether he
would agree with Brian Crozier, Franco’s biographer,
that by a strange irony of history he had saved Europe
from communism.
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45
The Dawkins Delusion
Peter Mullen
The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness,
Bliss David Bentley Hart, Yale University Press, 2013,
£18.99.
This is the most intelligent, perceptive, and amusing
book of philosophical polemics I have read in many
years. It is an antidote to the trivial slanging match
which makes up the so-called ‘God debate’ between
the new atheists such as Richard Dawkins and many
prominent theologians. Both sides in this argument are
so bad, says Bentley Hart, that they deserve each other.
For instance, the somewhat intellectually challenged
great zoologist Richard Dawkins has written that if
God exists we ought to be able to detect him with our
scientific instruments. Bentley Hart usefully points out
that no theologian in the history of the world’s faiths
has ever surmised that God is an object in his own
universe. On the other side, creationists are wrong to
suppose, as the deists supposed, that God is merely
some version of the great architect who formed the
world and then left it to run itself.
By contrast, Bentley Hart reiterates the views of the
medieval theologians: that God does not exist, and he is
not a being like other beings; rather he is the ground of
being who bestows reality on to the natural order. That
is, as the medieval thinkers said, God is the necessary
first cause who makes actual and real what would
otherwise be only potential. There is nothing in the
merely natural order which could possibly account for
the existence of the natural order. It is contingent and
requires that necessary first cause here (and in Aquinas)
identified as God. Some materialist philosophers argue
that for its existence the universe requires only chaos
and the so-called laws of physics operating upon that
chaos. This fails to understand that, not only are the
laws of physics constantly changing in the light of our
new thoughts, if there are laws of physics at all, then
there is already some sort of order and not a mere chaos.
So much for this illuminating study of being. The
second part of the book is a discussion of consciousness
by which we apprehend being. Bentley Hart shows the
implausibility of the materialist view of consciousness
as an epiphenomenon – a kind of accident – arising
out of the material substance of the brain. The mind is
not reducible to the brain and natural selection cannot
account for the subtle uses of the brain which the mind
employs (for instance) to contemplate philosophical
theology or to listen to Bach. There was nothing in the
process of evolution to programme the development
46
of the brain on these lines. The third part of this book
concerns the intentionality of human intelligence: that
is, the way in which our minds are attracted to the
possibility of the truths of existence – Being.
It is refreshing to find a book so original and
piercing so acutely the fog of so much that passes
for philosophical theology. The originality here so
brilliantly considered by Bentley Hart is in fact a
representation of the insights of the great medieval
metaphysicians which, as he shows, have a very
wide ecumenical context, for they are what have
always been taught by the mystical theologians of all
the main religions. These profound insights into the
nature of being have been forgotten and neglected
since the Enlightenment, to the tragic impoverishment
of philosophical understanding. Moreover, there is
nothing obscurely technical about this riveting book.
To read it is to have the scales removed from one’s
eyes and the supposed revelations of the materialist
philosophy seen at last for what they are: blinkers. And
the vaunted Enlightenment itself is rather a clouding
over. As a result, the philosophy of the succeeding
four hundred years has been very dull, with a few
notable exceptions such as Immanuel Kant and R G
Collingwood. As a philosophical theologian, Bentley
Hart is a man among boys.
back to contents
Owning Jack Kennedy
Ron Capshaw
JFK: Conservative, Ira Stoll, Basic Books, 2013,
$20.40.
For 50 years, liberals have owned JFK. Bill Clinton,
hailed as the heir apparent, showed a picture of him
with Kennedy that implied a torch was being passed
via a handshake. To cement the image of succession,
Clinton laid a wreath at the Kennedy eternal flame
before assuming office. Chris ‘Thrill Running Down
My Leg’ Matthews once had a revealing slip of the
tongue when he gushingly introduced then candidate
John F. Kerry as ‘John F Kennedy’. Bolstered by Teddy
Kennedy proclaiming him the second coming of Jack,
Barack Obama emulates the former President by selfconsciously giving speeches in Berlin.
This ownership is jealously guarded, for whenever
Republicans have tried to invoke JFK, liberals have
quickly attacked them. Ira Stoll, a former Editor of
the New York Sun shows it was not Clinton, Kerry, or
Obama who is the heir apparent; it is Ronald Reagan.
Stoll digs up some impressive research to back this
up and shows how Camelot peddlers have edited and
Ein Berliner’ speech that you couldn’t work with the
communists. His anti-communism was so strong that
he turned American sporting events into arguments
that athletic talent was not a result of state, but of
individual initiative.
Stoll embarrasses Camelot merchants by showing
how much they doctored their research. Left out of their
retrospectives about the televised Cuban Missile Crisis
speech with its restrained tone was the bit directly
addressing the Cuban people. He declared that they
were living under a puppet regime controlled by the
Soviets and promised that one day they would be free.
Courtiers like Schlesinger and Sorenson reversed
the order of his American University speech calling on
Americans to ‘re-examine their attitudes toward the Soviet
Union’ to his more bellicose Berlin Speech, creating the
impression that the latter preceded the former. Left out of
their coverage of the American University speech were
Kennedy’s attacks on communism:
‘As Americans, we find communism profoundly
repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and
dignity. The Communist drive to impose their political
and economic system on others is the primary cause
of world tension today.’
Oliver Stone only shows Kennedy’s remarks
to Cronkite that it was up South Vietnam to win
‘their war’ without showing his other pledge not to
withdraw American troops. Theodore White in 1964,
interviewing Jackie Kennedy left out her wish that the
President wanted to be known for getting ahead of the
Russians, her dislike of those ‘wild-eyed’ liberals, and
that Kennedy had no illusions about the ‘gangster’
Krushchev.
Camelot historians cite Kennedy’s 1963 Nuclear
Test Ban treaty as proof of his liberalism, but do not
mention that underground tests of nuclear bombs were
still allowed. His creation of the Peace Corps was a
Cold War strategy; he wanted this organization to win
hearts and minds in countries uncommitted to either
side, and place them in the American camp.
For a book that condemns these omissions, Stoll
occasionally commits his own. He spends one
paragraph on Operation Mongoose, the Kennedybacked assassination plots against Castro, and
mentions CIA involvement, but does not say that the
Mafia was also part of the operation. However, Stoll’s
book is ‘perestroikia’ to the official liberal history and
he fairly admits that the Camelot myth had a basis in
reality, but it didn’t apply to Kennedy. There was a
President who met their qualifications, who favoured
higher taxes, national health insurance, wage and price
controls, and transcending ‘simplistic’ anticommunism
before he was removed from office. This president was
Richard Nixon, the bête noir of the Camelot camp.
spun to stake their claim.
Kennedy did not extend the welfare state or end
the Cold War as Oliver Stone claimed when he
called Kennedy ‘an American Gorbachev’. Instead
he supported across the board tax cuts like Reagan
would in 1980, reducing the size of government
because of the threat it posed to individual rights.
Kennedy had definite libertarian leanings when he
denounced communism as it made the individual the
creature of the state trumpeting religion over godless
collectivism. A dedicated Catholic, Kennedy even
echoed the liberals’ bête noir, Whittaker Chambers,
when he reduced the Cold War down to faith in God
versus faith in Man.
Liberals have been aware of these statements, and have
dealt with them in a variety of ways to retain him as an
icon. Some, like Camelot merchants Arthur Schlesinger
Jr. and Ted Sorenson, have argued that once in office,
Kennedy transcended his youthful conservatism and
became a born-again liberal. Others, like Oliver Stone,
charted this transformation after the Cuban Missile Crisis,
in which Kennedy horrified by how close the world came
to nuclear destruction, now wanted to end the Cold War.
Kennedy’s bellicose rhetoric was the typical gesture of
a politician telling audiences what they wanted to hear,
while pursuing dovish actions.
Stoll demolishes this desperate spin. He traces a clear
pattern of libertarianism and Cold War hawkishness
when Kennedy’s career began in 1946. In 1962-63,
Kennedy passed the first capital gains tax cut, which
was not a temporary measure to prime the economic
pump, for Stoll reveals that the President wanted this
to be a permanent fixture. Indeed, Kennedy regarded
tax cuts as his most important goal in a second term.
Stoll also shows that Kennedy was deeply committed
to defending South Vietnam and by his death had
increased the number of advisers there from 2,000 in
1961 to 15,500 in 1963. He told Walter Cronkite that
he intended to stay the course and that he admired
Diem, much maligned by liberals then and now, as
‘an extraordinary character’ who ‘held his country
together’ under ‘very adverse conditions’. He was
shocked by Diem’s death during a coup.
For those who argue that Kennedy was merely
staying on script and not expressing his true feelings,
Stoll shows that Kennedy heavily edited and added to
his speeches. His departures from the script, a gauge of
his true feelings, revealed anti-communist sympathies.
Even Ted Sorenson, his most liberal speechwriter,
revealed that he did not write Kennedy’s 1962 promise
to Cuban exiles that one day their flag ‘would fly in a
free Havana,’ (a promise he repeated in a 1963 speech,
proof that his emotional outburst was not a temporary
moment) nor his comment during his famous ‘Ich Bin
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47
FILM
was so cut glass, anyone she spoke to probably needed
stitches. Robert Newton was the sort of fruity, scenerychewing actor one can imagine demolishing a small
suburban terraced house like the one occupied by the
Gibbons family simply by walking through it. Indeed,
Scripted by Noël Coward (play) (uncredited),
a glance at most appraisals of the film by present-day
Anthony Havelock-Allan, David Lean, Ronald
liberals suggests they tend to review the credits rather
Neame (adaptation)
than the film itself. For instance, the Film 4 website
Scott Grønmark
accuses it of conjuring up a ‘toff propagandist’s
England’, refers to its ‘peculiar patrician tones’, and
dismisses its view of British history as ‘unreal’.
This Happy Breed, the most successful British box
The truth is that, remarkably for its time, This Happy
office film of 1944, began life as a Noël Coward stage Breed is entirely bereft of toffs: every character in it
play. The play’s London premiere was cancelled in is dead common. The tone isn’t in the least patrician,
1939 because of the outbreak of war, and it was first and the only peculiar thing about it (from a leftist
staged in Blackpool in 1942. The director, David Lean, perspective) is that it doesn’t treat the Gibbons family
in his first solo outing as a director, produced the film as either victims or exploitative class-traitors. One
version two years’ later.
suspects the script is convincing largely because
As the film opens, the First World War has just ended. of Coward’s genius for dialogue, and his humble
Londoners Frank and Ethel Gibbons and their three origins: his father was an unambitious piano salesman
children are moving into a terraced house in suburban in Teddington. Coward made no bones about his
Clapham. Frank, who served in the army, has found upbringing: ‘I was a suburban boy, born and bred in
work in a travel agency: the family is joining the lower- the suburbs of London, which I’ve always loved and
middle classes. The film ends on the eve of the Second always will.’ His fondness for, and understanding of,
World War as the couple,
these people is evident in
Remarkably for its time, This Happy Breed is
now empty nesters, prepare
every line. Coward isn’t
entirely bereft of toffs: every character in it is dead
to retire to a flat. Most
mocking the lower orders
common. .... and the only peculiar thing about
of the great events and
– he’s paying affectionate,
it .... is that it doesn’t treat the Gibbons family
social and political trends
accurate homage to the
as either victims or exploitative class-traitors
of the period are covered,
milieu in which he was
including the Empire
raised.
Exhibition, the General Strike, the Depression, the
What critics find unsettling about This Happy Breed
Abdication, Munich, mass broadcasting, mass tourism, are the political assumptions underlying it – Coward
and the rise of the motor car (one of their children dies was deeply conservative, as becomes obvious in the
in a car crash). Lean’s skill as a director ensures that scene where Frank Gibbons clashes with his son, Reg,
the scene in which the family receive the news is one during the General Strike (Reg has been involved in
of the most mutedly heart-rending in all cinema).
some street violence, while Dad has been out helping
As a depiction of lower-middle class English life to keep basic services running). After they’ve agreed
between the wars, the film is fascinating: as pure to differ, Gibbons père has this to say:
entertainment, it is enormously satisfying. Because
I belong to a generation of men most of whom
its Shakespearean title isn’t intended ironically, it’s
aren’t here any more. We all did the same thing for
no wonder that the film tends to make conservatives
the same reason, no matter what we thought about
purr with pleasure.
politics. Well, that’s all over and done with, and
A glance at the names involved in the film would
we’re carrying on as best we can, as though nothing
suggest it really shouldn’t have worked at all. David
happened. But in fact several things happened, and
one of them was this country suddenly got tired.
Lean went on to become the master of epic tales shot in
She’s tired now. But the old girl’s got stamina, don’t
exotic locations. Noël Coward was, of course, the chief
you make any mistake about that, and it’s up to us
purveyor of brittle, upper-middle class repartee of the
ordinary people to keep things steady. Now, that’s
‘terribly flat, Norfolk’ variety. Celia Johnson’s accent
This Happy Breed
Director David Lean
48
your job. And just you remember it!
Where they go wrong is trying to get things done
too quickly, and we don’t like doing things quickly
in this country. It’s like gardening. Somebody once
said we was a nation of gardeners. And they weren’t
far wrong. We like planting things and watching them
grow, looking out for changes in the weather…. What
works in other countries won’t work in this one. We
got our own way of settling things. It may be a bit
slow, and it may be a bit dull, but it suits us all right.
And always will.
Coward’s high regard for the English character is
evident in Frank Gibbons’s disappointment at the
public’s reaction to the Munich Agreement (I think it’s
safe to assume that Frank, or ‘Frenk’ as it’s pronounced
throughout, is a mouthpiece for the playwright’s own
views). When his sister (Aunt Sylvia) accuses Frank
of being a warmonger because he isn’t celebrating
‘peace in our time’, he tells her that the sight of
people – ‘English people, mark you’ shouting and
cheering with relief earlier that day made him ‘sick
to my stomach’. He,
and Coward, expected
better of them.
The playwright
demonstrates his
contempt for the
formulaic rhetoric of
leftist compassion in
the scene where the
Gibbons children
celebrate Christmas
with Reg’s pompous
young Marxist chum,
Sam Leadbetter. In
proposing a toast, Sam,
having accused them
of being members of
the bourgeoisie (with
whom, he explains, ‘it is really against my principles
to hobnob to any great extent’) continues: ‘As you
know there are millions and millions of homes today
where Christmas is naught but a mockery, where
there is neither warmth, nor food, nor even the bare
necessities of life, where little children, old before their
time, huddle round a fireless grate….’ to which the
feisty Queenie tartly responds, ‘Well, they’d be just as
well off if they stayed in the middle of the room then
wouldn’t they?’
One is reminded of the emetic rhetoric of ersatz
compassion employed by left-wingers whenever
the subject of food banks crops up. (Pleasingly, the
fiery young socialist, Sam, ends up marrying Vi and
turning into a contented member of the complacent
bourgeoisie.)
Coward’s conservative and deeply approving view of
English attitudes is clearly expressed in a conversation
between Frank and Ethel, who have escaped to the
back room to avoid Aunt Sylvia’s terrible singing.
Ethel is fretting about Sam’s revolutionary posturing:
‘But it’s wrong isn’t it, all this ‘down with everything’
business?’ In response, Frank delivers one of the film’s
main themes:
This Happy Breed might have been intended as
propaganda, but it paints a surprisingly realistic
portrait of family
life. Aunt Sylvia and
Ethel’s mother bicker
and row throughout.
Ethel is constantly
exhausted, tetchy and
somewhat joyless. As
for the children, the
teenage radical, Reg,
is a bit of a handful,
and the flighty middle
child, Queenie, who
despises her family’s
dull, respectable
existence, proves to be
more than a handful:
she runs off to France
with a married man.
After being deserted by him, she eventually comes
crawling back home, having been rescued by her
faithful admirer, sailor John Mills, who has saved her
from ruin by marrying her. Unsurprisingly, perhaps,
given that there was a war on, the importance of doing
one’s duty is the film’s key message.
It would be to easy to dismiss This Happy Breed
as a mildly entertaining slice of sentimental jingoism
produced by a lightweight social-climbing reactionary
who ultimately revealed a lack of patriotism by
spending decades as a tax exile. I prefer to see it as
a masterly portrait of the English before they were
subjected to decades of social engineering by those
who treat the concepts of national character and a
homogenous culture as synonyms for racism. Sad
to think that a film with the title This Happy Breed
produced today (probably with lottery funding) would
inevitably turn out to be a vicious satire on all the
values so wholeheartedly celebrated by Noël Coward
and David Lean seventy years ago.
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49
Battle Music
Ralph Berry
W
ar is difficult for music. Battaglia, a type
of work descriptive of battle sounds, dates
from the 16th century, and Monteverdi
composed in it. Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory
– Vittoria – extends the tradition but is seldom
performed. Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (with real
cannon for son et lumière occasions) clearly aspires
to the condition of film music. The programmatic
elements of conventional music pressed against the
constraints of form: I would class the opening of
Richard Strauss’s Don Juan as the finest cavalry charge
in music. But still war, which is chaotic, is opposed to
music, which defines order.
Film was the great artistic innovation of the 20th
century, with sound from the 1920s. At once a new
field was open to composers, which they fell upon
with huge relish. Music, for the first time, could openly
illustrate and enhance the visual aspects of battle, and
the programme became manifest. It is clear that music
does two aspects of war supremely well: the charge,
and the elegy for the fallen. The second is easy, for
elegies demand only the talents of the composer.
The first is much more challenging. Is the charge in
6/8 time, for example, or 4/4? I place the two great
champions of the genre, Walton and Prokofiev, as coequal. Walton’s Agincourt charge in Henry V (1944) is
brilliantly creative. Opening with a zither (an idea he
got from The Third Man) he moved the French charge
through the four phases of walk, trot, canter and gallop
before the arrow-flight climax. Prokofiev, in Alexander
Nevsky (1938), stuck to a repetitive two-stroke motif
for the Teutonic knights in their disciplined advance
across the ice, combined with a sardonic Latin chant
for the invading Teutons, while Eisenstein secured his
effects from cuts to the close-up, synchronized shots of
the armoured knights. The two-stroke motif, which is
deeply menacing, was later purloined by John Williams
for Jaws – and to the same effect. The battle itself
swiftly descended into incoherence once the enemies
had closed. Walton and Prokofiev stayed with 4/4, but
Hans Zimmer, in Gladiator (1999), chose the more
obvious 6/8 for Maximus’s cavalry.
To those memorable charges I add the opening credits
50
of The Battle of Algiers (1965). Gillo Pontecorvo and
Ennio Morricone provided the percussive soundtrack,
as the paras debouch from their transport and swarm
over the Casbah in their hunt for Ali. The soundtrack
has more than an echo of Shane (1953), as Alan
Ladd rides to his shoot-out with Jack Palance. In
Spartacus (1960), the steady advance of the Roman
legions with their rectangular mass complements
Alex North’s soundtrack. There is in it no special
excitement but a remorseless, cumulative effect. And
advance has potential beyond cavalry and infantry:
Klaus Doldinger’s attack music in Das Boot (1981) is
telling – submarines can charge too.
If one broadens the preliminaries to battle beyond
the charge, then Waterloo (1970) has a nice example.
Wellington’s aide incites the troops to a rousing singa-long:
Oo’s the lad who leathers the French?
Oor Ally!
Oo makes the parlay-voos to run?
Oor Ally!
Opera, which is confined by its nature to static
staging, can still manage the rousing march-past of the
Russian infantry before Borodino in Prokofiev’s War
and Peace (1942-3). The Committee for the Arts had
demanded that the war scenes receive a more heroic
and patriotic emphasis, and they got it.
Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V is a good pairing with
Olivier’s, who admitted no musical background to his
‘trumpet-moaned’ Crispin Crispian oration. Branagh
made the speech into a great operatic aria. Everything
comes together in the music, by Patrick Doyle. The
repeated, minor-key questionings of the pre-Agincourt
soliloquy are resolved into the major-key serenity of
‘What’s he that wishes so?’ What follows leaves the
personal and broadens into a public anthem. This,
the accompaniment to Crispin Crispian, is music for
a great State occasion, such as Parry or Elgar could
have composed. It swells into a noble, aspiring and
passionate acclamation for the British soldiery, and
what they stand for. Henry’s achievement is to unite
the army, and himself, through the key word ‘brother.’
Doyle’s music is a celebration of that achievement.
what the lithographs of the Cherry Pickers at Balaclava
capture. Tough on the losers, but it is not the function
of ’copter cavalry to purvey compassion. To bring
in the sense of pity is to editorialize, always a snare.
Shostakovich avoided it by a simple separation: action
in the second movement, elegy in the third. To meld
is a classic error, like backing action in Vietnam with
the Barber Adagio. The director wants us to know that
he too disapproves of war, or at least this war. Can we
not take that for granted?
For all the triumphs of film battle, nothing surpasses
Holst’s supreme
evocation of
war: Mars,
The Bringer
o f Wa r . T h e
battering fivefour rhythms
foreshadow
mechanized
warfare, while
the trumpets
and tenor tuba
pursue each
other upwards
without reaching
a resolution.
The music sinks
to a desolate
weariness, before the storm returns to a heavily
repeated dissonance and a shattering, poised yet
unconvinced end. You could call the final chord of
Mars an armistice, rather than peace. Holst wrote
this movement of The Planets in May 1914, and the
first public performance was in September 1918. The
premonitions of art were a trailer for history.
Conventional music turned more and more to
programmatic elements that dealt openly with battle.
Shostakovich’s Symphony No 7 (Leningrad) featured
the German advance through Russia in 1941, in a
long and tedious second movement which repeated,
Bolero-like, the War theme of the first movement.
Bartók derided that movement, and I have to agree.
Vastly superior is Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony, a
programme symphony titled The Year 1905 (1957). The
massacre of the unarmed workmen in the square of the
Winter Palace, St Petersburg, is presented with graphic
realism. The
music portrays
the scurrying
of the people
before the sabres
and the horses’
hoofs, and the
firing of cannon
and rifles. No one
does gunfire like
Shostakovich.
After this comes
the adagio, the
elegy for Russia
itself, which the
BBC used for its
monumental TV
series The Great
War. Shostakovich’s 11th has been dismissively
regarded as ‘film music’; I cannot see that a great
symphony can be downgraded on that account.
Battle itself remains the ultimate challenge, but it
can be met. John Barry managed the battle passages
in Zulu with a brooding, repeated four-chord phrase.
I propose Walton’s air battle in The Battle of Britain
film (1969), a sinister ballet in waltz time that somehow
catches the swoops and bursts of fire of aerial combat.
Walton’s score for the film was rejected by the
producers, much to his chagrin, but they kept, rightly,
the air battle. And there is the astounding imaginative
leap of Francis Ford Coppola, who in Apocalypse Now
(1969) used Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ for the
helicopter flight that strafed a Vietnam village. That
came from a US Cavalry unit (led by Robert Duvall,
with his notorious ‘I love the smell of napalm in the
morning’). The cavalry charge had yet again found its
musical correlative.
This takes us back to the delicate question: where
does the composer stand? Or the film director? Wagner
knew nothing of film and was not writing music
connected with war. Coppola chose the Ride, which
everyone remembers, because it realizes the glee, the
sheer enjoyment of cavalry on the rampage. That is
Ralph Berry spent most of his teaching career in
Canada. He has written extensively on Shakespeare.
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51
Viennese Portraiture
Andrew Wilton
Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900,
Edited by Gemma Blackshaw, with contributions from
Tag Gronberg, Julie M Johnson, Doris H Lehmann,
Elana Shapira and Sabine Wieber, Yale University
Press, 2013, £35.
Austria-Hungary and the multi-cultural melting-pot
that Vienna had become in the closing decade of the
nineteenth century. The walls of historic Vienna had
been demolished in the 1850s, to be replaced by the
great encircling boulevard of the Ringstrasse, with its
grand houses of the new rich, the haute-bourgeoisie or
There has recently been a positive plague of art Burgertum who gave the city its fin-de-siècle character.
exhibitions touting themselves as dealing with the This was to be embodied in the blowsy and technically
phenomenon of ‘the Modern’, as though no period rather dubious flamboyance of Hans Makart, the ‘new
of history were comprehensible except in relation to
Rubens’, with his patent
the present day. Even ‘Ice
garish ‘Makart red’ and
Age Art’ of 30 thousand
gorgeously chromatic acres
years ago was billed by the
of allegorical canvas.
British Museum last year as
With the removal of the
the ‘Arrival of the Modern
walls the restrictive culture
Mind’.
o f M e t t e r n i c h ’s p o s t Facing the Modern: The
Napoleonic Vienna relaxed,
Portrait in Vienna 1900 was
and immigrants flocked
published to accompany an
into the capital. They were
exhibition at the National
often Jewish, often very
Gallery in London, from 9
talented, yet often very
October last year until 12
unsure of their standing
January 2014. It was the
in a still traditionalist and
largest, so far, of a series of
aristocratic order. Should
exhibitions mounted there on
they assimilate, fit in as best
topics related to aspects of
they could, or should they
European painting generally
assert a proud independence,
neglected in London. The
using a language that was
book is fully illustrated so
deliberately alien to the
it can be read independently
Burgertum? This social
of the show. ‘Vienna 1900’
turmoil was reflected in
is the shorthand phrase used
large numbers of cases of
to denote the city of the
madness and of suicide,
Secession, of Freud and
notably among Jews. It was
Richard Strauss in the 1890s Oskar Kokoschka, Lotte Franzos, 1909, The Phillips no coincidence that Freud
and the first decade or so
developed his practice and
Collection, Washington DC.
of the twentieth century,
theories in ‘Vienna 1900’.
so for once the conceptual
As the book makes clear,
opposition of ‘Modern’ and ‘Traditional’ is appropriate. there operated on the side of conservatism a predictable
We only have to think of the music of the time to see nostalgia for the past: just as British Romantics looked
the point: Richard Strauss composed Salome and back to ‘Sixty Years Since’ in Scott’s first novel,
Rosenkavalier, the lushest of late Romantic works, just Waverley (1814), so the fin-de-siècle Viennese thought
as Arnold Schönberg and the composers of the New of the middle-classes of the Biedermeier, painted with
Viennese School were beginning their experiments such glossy refinement by Amerling and Waldmüller,
with expressionism and atonalism.
as embodying an irretrievably comfortable world in
It was a standoff between the old Imperial capital of which civilised folk escaped from the harsher realities
52
of an authoritarian regime by enjoying innocent family
life and the pleasures of the great outdoors. The new
Vienna seemed to repudiate domestic innocence for
psychological turmoil, the beauties of nature for
claustrophobic urban life. When the Secession was set
up in 1897 as an artists’ exhibition space and centre
for championing new theories of art and design, this
repudiation took very self-conscious forms.
A leading figure of the Secession was Gustav
Klimt, who had already established himself as a
formidably gifted painter working quite happily
within the boundaries of classic Academicism. His
Young girl seated of 1894 could not be mistaken for
a work of the Biedermeier period, yet its exquisitely
finished rendering of a calmly sedate, waxen-faced
middle-class young woman is a logical continuation
of the Biedermeier mood. By 1897, though, Klimt
was decorating the Secession building and producing
portraits of beautiful Jewish women in a startlingly
different style. The faces are lifelike, but simplified
and staring like those of icons, set amid flat patterns
of red and gold ornament that are partly costumes and
partly just background patterns. It’s clear that Klimt is
making a conscious, indeed self-conscious, statement
about the aims and objects of art and particularly of
portraiture. The portrait has ceased to be primarily
about the sitter and is much more an expression of the
artist’s cast of mind and his private preoccupations.
This was inevitable, perhaps, in the culture Freud
was describing: subjective self-analysis has become
the lingua franca; the objective delineation of
another’s likeness, respectful and subservient to
their individuality, has been banished. Yet there was
in the new portraiture a potential for far-reaching
exploration of the psyche of the sitter. With the early
paintings of Oskar Kokoschka (born 1886) we have
a pitiless exposé of the neuroses of fascinating but
deeply disturbed personalities. Kokoschka’s methods
embody this frank exploration: disjunct areas of paint,
unfinished brushwork with exposed canvas; the faces
contorted, the hands flickering or twisted in strange
gestures of bewilderment or aggression. This is not
‘Society portraiture’, though it is, in a startling new
sense, the portraiture of a society.
These developments were summed up in the brief and
precocious career of Egon Schiele, who was ten years
old in 1900, and died of influenza only nine years later.
There is indeed something irredeemably adolescent
about his work, but its tortured introspection and
blatant eroticism have always seemed to encapsulate
the neuroses of the time. It’s a quirk of the book that
its wish to relate the present to the past takes it so far
as to compare Schiele’s truly ghoulish self-portrait,
showing an apparently flayed face painted in tones
oddly reminiscent of the late Lucian Freud, peering
over what looks like the stump of a shoulder, with
Anselm Feuerbach’s suavely urbane Self-portrait with
a Cigarette of over thirty years earlier peering over
what looks like the stump of a shoulder. The Feuerbach
is described in terms that include words like ‘tense’,
‘theatricality’ and ‘transgression’ – terms that might
make sense in a totally different cultural setting, but
in comparison with the Schiele are absurd.
Schiele died in 1919 as a consequence of the flu
epidemic that claimed Klimt: there was a sense of
fatality about their hectic, overwrought view of
the world and of themselves – though Klimt never
produced an explicit self-portrait; and in the last year of
his life Schiele was moving towards a decidedly more
conventional style. Schönberg on the other hand was
to live into the 1950s, having emigrated to America
and converted from Judaism to Christianity and
back again – an endlessly inventive and exploratory
personality who seems unlike the others to have had
few doubts as to his talent or his historical importance.
In the experimental context of Viennese painting in
the 1910s, his sense of mission and of purpose may be
understandable; the authors hold him up as a great artist
in the league of Klimt and Kokoschka (who did not die
until 1980). One of his pupils expressed the feelings of
his admirers: ‘These pictures … reveal to us the soul
and lot of an artist possessed of almost supernatural
power … They must be judged by a standard other
than that applied to merely pleasant, enjoyable works
of art. We must expect no dainty, toying rhythms, but
the utterance of a passionate soul, harrowed by doubt,
often indulging in sarcasm, but always feeling deeply.’
When we turn back to the pictures themselves,
we find an artist of limited expressive authority, an
amateur indeed, whose directness of approach makes
for a certain stolid or forthright honesty, but with
almost none of the truly disturbing technical daring
of his colleagues. It was obviously only too easy to
read into the paintings what one knew of Schönberg
the revolutionary – yet like so many revolutionaries,
passionately conservative – composer.
The survey of the subject includes separate sections
on women artists, on Jews as artists and patrons, and
on a fascination with death that had been a longstanding Austrian preoccupation which acquired new
significance in the heated atmosphere of ‘Vienna 1900’.
It’s a pity that the writing throughout (and, oddly, all
the contributors are women) is flat and uninspiring,
except for a lively short introduction by Edmund de
Waal: the subject surely calls for some flair in bringing
this fascinating and still enigmatic period to life.
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53
IN SHORT
Quack Policy, Jamie Whyte, IEA, 2013, £10
Evidence-based policy is used in medicine and many
other fields. A new drug or treatment is compared with
an existing drug or treatment or with no treatment at
all, to see which cures a condition more quickly, or
prolongs life for longer. Evidence-based arguments
can be misused, particularly by those wanting more
state interference in our lives.
Jamie Whyte looks at four examples: alcohol pricing,
passive smoking, global warming, and happiness.
Researchers looking at alcohol pricing found that a
minimum price of 50p. (ie around 75p. for a glass
of wine) would reduce alcohol consumption, and
should reduce the harm caused (by ill-health, crime,
unemployment and absenteeism) by 12 per cent over
ten years. Such calculations ignored the value of the
well-being the consumers felt, which they must have
valued above the cost of their drink.
Passive smoking is alleged to cause an increase in lung
cancer among non-smokers. The US Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) analysed thirty studies of
passive smoking, and, by eliminating nineteen studies
it did not like, and reducing the confidence level from
95 per cent to 90 per cent, concluded that there was a
19 per cent increased chance of cancer in non-smokers.
Since about 0.3 per cent of non-smokers get lungcancer in their life-time, passive smoking would raise
the rate to 0.36 per cent. The EPA did not believe that
passive smoking could not be harmful, so it juggled
with the statistics to obtain the ‘right’ answer because
it ‘knew’ it would be the best way to avoid confusing
the public.
Climate change has a long history, with another ice
age predicted in the 1970s, and now global warming,
said to be caused, or increased, by increased man-made
greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane etc) in
the atmosphere. Climate scientists have used the laws
of physics about the absorption and propagation of
heat (from the sun) to predict changes in atmospheric
temperature from increased CO2. They have then used
assumptions about heat transfer to land, or the oceans,
and the effect of the heat energy on winds, ocean
currents, clouds, etc. Many different climate models
have been developed, and used on powerful computers,
to predict effects in fifty or a hundred years. The laws of
physics are certain, but the further assumptions are not,
and will not be until predictions made now, or recently,
are checked in fifty years time. Nevertheless, green
54
taxes are being used now to increase our energy bills.
In 1972 the then King of Bhutan announced that ‘gross
national happiness’ would be the most important factor
in planning the development of Bhutan, and complicated
methods of measuring it were developed. In 2011 David
Cameron followed this example and asked the Office for
National Statistics to develop such a measurement. They
asked a British sample to rate their satisfaction with life,
happiness, anxiety, and worthwhileness of their activities,
each on a scale of 0 to 10 (the average result was 7.3 out
of 10). There is no way of knowing what each person
means by complete happiness, or by zero happiness, so
these ONS results are meaningless.
Whyte has looked carefully at four ways in which
science can be abused in studying policy options. The
suspicion is that it is often used to give the answer the
authorities want.
Robin Cave
How We Invented Freedom and Why it Matters,
Daniel Hannan, Head of Zeus, 2013, £6.99
The Anglosphere as a name dates back to the mid’90s with entries in the Merriam-Webster and Oxford
English Dictionaries, but Daniel Hannan explores its
ethos beyond its narrow definition. Bringing together
the struggles for Common Law from the Saxon past
and the Civil War fought for parliamentary supremacy,
he identifies the key features of the Anglosphere
inheritance: the rule of law and personal liberty, and
contrasts them with European countries and other
systems.
The book includes many quotations, some of which
readers will know and some which are new. For
example, ‘government of the people, for the people and
by the people’ originates in the prologue of the Wycliffe
Bible. John Adams, in describing the common law
system, says ‘the universal happiness of individuals,
were never so skilfully and successfully consulted as
in that most excellent monument of human art, the
common law of England’. There is a link between the
1689 Bill of Rights and the American Declaration, for
many clauses, were reproduced in the latter without
amendment. The US Bill of Rights and amendments
of the constitution flow from the same source; the Fifth
Amendment owes much to Clause 29 of Magna Carta.
No wonder it is so revered by Americans.
Hannan identifies the two Anglosphere Civil Wars,
publications Christopher Snowden has written about
government, or specifically the European Commission,
paying a lobbyist or group for favourable influence.
Snowden identifies two problems with many of
Britain’s larger charities: some receive a significant
or even large part of their income from government
– national, local and/or the lottery – and spend effort
and money lobbying government to do what they are
themselves set up to do. Other charities, though not
directly state-funded, derive income from claiming
Gift Aid money back from the state, and are mainly
engaged in political campaigning, to get more state
expenditure on their objectives, or to change the law in
particular ways, eg for minimum pricing on alcohol or
plain packaging of tobacco. The Charity Commission
states that political campaigning may not be the main
activity of a registered charity, but in practice does not
appear to enforce this rule.
Many charities, such as ActionAid, Oxfam, and CAfOD,
are part of the IF Campaign, otherwise known as the
Enough Food for Everyone IF campaign or Make
Poverty History 2, which was accused of being ‘secretly
orchestrated’ by the government to support the policy of
donating 0.7 per cent of GDP in foreign aid. Many people
think that in our present situation we should not be giving
so much to rich people in poor countries.
Government (and local government) should withdraw
money from politically oriented organisations,
particularly those claiming to be ‘progressive’, and
stop funding lobbyists.
the English Civil War and the American War of
Independence, as having common roots. He shows that
both sides in the American War of Independence would
have considered themselves patriots and the present use
of the phrase, only for those wanting independence, is
a modern contrivance. Paul Revere would never have
said ‘The British’ are coming as he considered himself
British, but would have either said ‘The Redcoats are
coming’, or ‘the Regulars are coming’. The American
Civil War also had roots in these two conflicts.
The present day global Anglosphere is based on
English being an international language but also on a
common inheritance of values. Even India, despite all
its difficulties, has survived as a democracy. Hannan is
not wholly pessimistic about the future despite threats
from the European Union and the misguided centralism
of the Obama administration.
In an ideal world this well researched book should
be available in every school; politicians would also
benefit from reading it as they could all too easily give
up what our ancestors fought for: freedom, the rule of
law and representative democracy.
Keith Miles
The Sock Doctrine: What can be done about statefunded political activism? Christopher Snowden, IEA
Discussion Paper No 53, 2014.
In real life a sock puppet is a hand inside an
(embroidered) sock. In the internet world it means a
misleading use of an online identity. In two previous
Robin Cave
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55
The Old English
St Mary’s Church (14th century), Yatton, Somerset
The New Barbarians
‘Can o’ Ham’ Banks and Offices (planned
2016) St Mary’s Axe, London E1

Spring 2014 - The Salisbury Review

Transcription

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